I was at The Tossed Salad Book Club meeting today. The first one. If you aren't already following/on the group, here's the link. I posted a couple of photographs from the event. I am still learning about the innards of the camera on the phone hence please, no comments about the images.

It was a much better turn-out than I anticipated ;) I had figured around 8 folks turning up excluding the organizers and, we had at least a bit over 30 and a few folks standing throughout the event. That's a promising start. For the fact that this was the first time the book club was meeting (barring the times the organizers have informally met !) the selection of the book and the availability of the author was a great combination. A quick introduction about the book club, some rules, and, an introduction about the book and the author started the show.

Amish is an engaging personality and, Poonam was an efficient moderator. The discussion was a bit one-sided though with a larger share of the conversation being steered by Amish including his nice side-stepping of that query about whether the fact that the trilogy is in English and not widely available in local languages is a factor of him not getting brick-bats from the usual suspects. The book lends itself to layered interpretations and sometimes re-thinking about our oral traditions of myths and estabilished folklore-history-mythology. This was also probably a reflection in the questions and, the contextual side-jumps in the conversation. Amish took a quick trip into his motivations and process (or, lack thereof !) during writing of the book along with fielding questions on the date of the next book on the trilogy (I wonder why no one asked him about the third book at all :D). It would probably be nice to have him around the time of publication of the next book and open it up to a much larger audience.

In short it was a good two hours well spent (and, I didn't purchase a book even though I was at a bookstore !). The next book up for discussion and critical appreciation is A Confederacy of Dunces. And, I hope that more folks come to the group meeting reading the book or, at least reading up notes etc around the book. Sahil mentioned something along the lines of sharing reading material links etc. Hope that's going to work out nicely.

As always it was good to meet a few twitter handles ;)