I did a bit of personal brainstorming to see if I could come up with an idea that was worth using for an Open Door story. I felt certain that even as I was jotting down these ideas there would be people sitting in front of their notebooks, chewing the ends of their pens unable to come up with even a minor story.

Here were some of my thoughts.

The Open Door could be the name of a book, a private club, a poem, a house, a Science Program. It could be the name of a project … for example, a science research project that goes badly wrong. Maybe … people step through an arch that is named The Open Door and they are supposed to be beamed over to their chosen destination but in fact all that gets beamed is their smoking boots (yes, I know it’s crazy,  but why not?). Maybe someone will volunteer to be the one who goes through the open door but they never come back – maybe they end up somewhere so much better than here, or perhaps they end up inside a piece of scientific equipment, imprisoned, unable to get out and unable to call for help. (Heh heh!)

The Open door could be the story of someone who keeps telling members of her family to lock the back door and makes a real fuss if she finds the back door left unlocked by her stepchildren. She is always gazing out of the window imagining she sees people out there in the dark corners of the garden. Then one day, distracted by something (her cat?), she accidentally leaves the door open and something (???) comes in to find her. (Hee hee!)

The story could be about an old lady in an old people’s home. In the nursing home she longs to know what is on the other side of the door of her room, but the door is always locked. She asks people about the door and what is outside but they are vague or pretend not to understand her. Then one day she struggles over to the door tries the handle and it is open. She steps through the door into a fabulous garden … and into death. (sob! )

Actually I quite like these stories. Maybe I’ll write them up myself.

Our first meeting will be in:

Room 152 (ILC/Library Arzanah)

Thursday 15 September

9:30am-11:00am.

Just show up on the day with a pen and your writing notebook.

WOW! Seriously obsessed with the production of

amazing creative fiction and non-fiction.

If you are a new student or a returning student, we would love you to join us on Wednesday 21 September from 11:00am to 12:00 midday to talk about what we’ve done as a book club in the past , what activities we’ll run this year and … what books we have read recently and recommend.
If you like books and reading … or if you just like to talk and listen to stories, then come and sign up for a new breathtaking year with Las Senoras Book Club.

Day: Wednesday
Date: 21 September
Time: 11:00-12:00
Place: Room 146 (Library/ILC)

• a trip to the Logos ship to browse and buy their discounted books, and for a private tour of the ship’s engineering bits.

              Can the Senoras be safely let loose on a very big boat? (‘No, don’t press that red button! Nooo!’)

• then there is the Abu Dhabi Book Fair, 15th through to the 20th March. Last year the Senoras along with their fellow students on the men’s and the women’s campuses got a total of 50,000 dirhams’ worth of book vouchers. That was a good reason for them to hurry along to the Bookfair. Just in case readers of this blog think that extrinsic motivation i.e. money, is the only thing that will attract our Senoras to a Bookfair, they/you are wrong. They really do love books and they love owning them, stroking them, reading them. They will go to the Bookfair with or without vouchers. We are not involved in a forum this year, but Vanessa wants to capture an unsuspecting author and coerce him or her into posing for one of her READ posters. I think that’s a great idea but have warned her that most authors would probably want big bucks for doing that. Anyway, we’ll give it a try.

At this meeting we were keen to learn what the Senoras are currently reading. First up was The Summoning by Kelley Armstrong. Las Senoras Book Club is a revelation to all of us. Where do the Senoras find these books that the rest of us have never heard of? Vanessa and I attend the meetings for educational reasons: we get tutored. Now this Kelley Armstrong is a very popular and prolific writer, it seems, and shame on us for not having heard about her.

Kelley sometimes looks like this:

But normally she looks like this:

Either way looks fine to me. She has an excellent website: www.kelleyarmstrong.com from which I learnt that she has written a huge number of books. It all started in school. Instead of writing about ‘girls and dolls,’ in her English assignments, she wrote about ‘undead girls’ and ‘evil dolls.’  This must have be rather worrying for her parents. As an adult, I wonder if she was ever a language teacher because she writes a lot of  -ing books (The Summoning, The Awakening, The Reckoning, The Gathering, Living with the Dead, Waking the Witch, Becoming) and a lot of -en books (Bitten, Broken, Stolen, Frostbitten) and a few -ic books (Chaotic, Angelic). I tried to think of some other titles that she might like to write in the future for our Senoras … maybe Chocoholic, Waiting for the Bus, Passing the Exam, Failing the Exam, Eaten Too Much. I’m sure she won’t be needing my help to think up new titles. Coming soon are two new books: Waking the Witch in April 2011, and Spell Bound in Summer 2011.

So, what made this particular Senora choose Kelley’s book The Summoning?  Well, it was … the cover. And here it is:

According to the Senoras, who scrutinized the artwork at length, ‘The cover is awesome!’ I wonder … is there not perhaps something Twilight-ish about it? How about this one?

Whatever the thoughts these covers provoke, they certainly strike a chord with our Senoras. Dear Readers, when was the last time you judged a book by its cover? Did it live up to your expectations?

A few days after our meeting, one of the Senoras asked me how I picked the books that I read. ‘Well, I mean,’ she said, ‘all the covers of the books you choose are so ugly … so I wonder how you decide what you are going to read.’ Mmm … I thought. It never occured to me to choose a book for its cute cover. True, there are some covers I like and some I dislike intensely.  Here’s how I choose a book:

1. I’ve read a book by the same author before and enjoyed it.
2. The book has won a prize and I want to find out why by reading it for myself.
3. A friend has read the book and raved about it to me.

Those are the main reasons. I told the Senoras about what I had just finished reading – a book called Solar by the British novelist Ian McEwan. This meets all my book-choosing criteria: 1. I’ve read several of his other books, 2. Solar has won a prize, and 3. a friend read it and told me about it. But, according to the Senoras, the cover is really awful:

And that is probably why Ian McEwan, author of more than 11 novels and winner of the 1998 Booker Prize, looks so sad in this photo. (The book is good though!)

Also the Señoras have to make their presence felt. They need to work a shift 24/7, make a bit of noise (that shouldn’t be difficult) and replace the whiteboard that’s covered in indelible marker scribblings. Fatima has some posters to put on the walls. Okay, so they’re from Twilight and Harry Potter … Vanessa and I will fight back our disappointment: we were hoping for something a little more chic.

Then there will have to be a Las Señoras Book Club Cubicle Launch Party and – budget-permitting – we will fly in celebrities … Brangelina, Justin Timberlake … I think you get the picture.

 Our book club storming produced some good ideas. Here’s a list of book club things-to-do:

1. Run an excursion to the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair (ADIBF) next March.

2. Send Vanessa in ahead of time to negotiate a book voucher deal for us: not a lot of people know that at the last ADIBF, thanks to her, our students got 20,000 dirhams to spend on their favourite books: that made Stephenie Meyer very happy and saved her family from a life of austerity.

3. Do a presentation at the Book Fair: last year Fatima and Vanessa took part in a discussion forum at ADIBF. Fatima made a fashion statement by wearing her gold trainers. Vanessa made no statement at all because she got stopped by the police as she was speeding to the venue and then lost her BlackBerry when she got there … but I digress.

4. Organise our own Las Señoras International Book Fair (LSIBF).

5. Run more writing competitions.

6. Invite a famous poet to come and talk to us. If you’re a famous poet, please get in touch.

7. Run a competition to write a book review and then put the best reviews in the library catalogue. Mmm … sounds like work.

8. Have a competition where people read the beginning of the summary of a novel … and then have to write an ending to the story. We agreed that the time has come for someone to write a new ending to The Lovely Bones. That murderer really has to be brought to justice. It’s causing the Señoras a lot of sleepless nights.

9. Have a quiz bowl. Erm … what’s a quiz bowl? Vanessa says we have to agree to read two or three books and then we pick a question about them out of a quiz bowl, and win a prize if we get the answer right.

The Señoras went a bit silent when they heard this.

‘What? We all have to read the same books for a quiz? Too much. Too much.’

‘Okay,’ said Vanessa, ‘we could quiz you on some famous books that everyone has read.’

‘Oh, right!’ said the Senoras, ‘you mean like Harry Potter … or Twilight?’

No, that wasn’t really what Vanessa meant. Also that would count us out since we’re still stuck on Twilight page 100. We would need help.

10. Finally, invite someone – anyone really – to come and talk to us about their favourite books, their preferred authors … and the meaning of life.

     … and find out what they had been reading and what they intended to read.

     When we met for the first time on Tuesday, the Señoras looked refreshed, sparkling and very intelligent. They are older now and look intimidatingly professional. Let’s face it, when you get to this stage of your studies, there’s no stopping you.
     The theme of our meeting was ‘We know what you read this summer.’ After many hours of evaluating the evidence and compiling our research we had come to the conclusion that this summer the Señoras read …

Stephenie Meyers, Dan Brown, Nicholas Sparks,
Sophie Kinsella and John Grisham.

     And we were right … except that we missed out Jeffrey Archer. This is Jeffrey Archer by the way:

And here are some Señora Quotes:
Señora Quote 1: ‘Dan Brown is sooo good!’
Señora Quote 2: ‘I love Nicholas Sparks. His books are amazing!’

Dan and Nicholas will be very happy if they read this blog. Vanessa and I listened to these quotes with some suspicion. Now we are going to have to read Dan and Nicholas to find out why their books are sooo good and amazing. This book club is more work than we bargained for.
In this meeting we also did some book club storming. As everyone knows, book club storming is the same as brainstorming except that you focus on book clubs instead of brains.

So, please can you now do your own book club storming and think up some ideas for this year’s book club activities.
In the next post I’ll tell you what ideas the Señoras came up with in our meeting.

Right now it is just me and Fatima and Vanessa. I am thinking ahead to next semester about reading and writing activities. Vanessa is busy adding to the Library’s Leisure Reading Collection and Fatima … well she is reading Marked. Wait a minute! Am I mistaken or hasn’t she already read Marked? Here’s my great research finding: young people re-read a lot of books. Take Fatima, for example. How many times has she read Twilight? How many times has she read Marked? I suppose if you really love a set of characters, after living alongside them in a book it’s very difficult to be parted from them … so you simply re-read the book.

Now if you haven’t read Marked – I haven’t actually – here’s what you need to know. It’s the first book in the House of Night series (published in 2007). The other books are Betrayed, Chosen, Untamed, Hunted, Tempted and Burned. I count seven books. Number eight – Awakened – is due for publication in January 2011. Naturally the books are about vampires or – if you prefer – vampyres. But these stories are about vampires that go to ‘finishing school.’ For those of you who don’t know, a ‘finishing school’ is a place well-bred (?) young women are sent to in order to learn high-level social skills and etiquette before they go out into the big wide world … and find – or receive – a husband. It would seem there are important skills that vampires need to know. Maybe there are polite ways to drink blood that vampires should learn. What do I know?

The protagonist of Marked is 16-year-old Zoey Redbird. Is that name strange or is it my imagination? As I’m sure you must be aware, names in novels often have symbolic significance. I wonder what that one means?

The House of Night series has two authors – a mother and daughter team: P.C. Cast (mother) and Kristin Cast (daughter). Being part of a family writing team is not such a bad idea, but how would you feel about writing a book with your mum? She might disapprove of the things you want to write, or maybe you’d be embarrassed by some of the ideas she was coming up with. And why is Kristin called Kristin while her mum is called P.C.? In British English PC could stand for Politically Correct … or Police Constable. In fact Kristin’s mum has a perfectly acceptable name: Phyllis Christine. (P.C., don’t worry about it. Nothing to be ashamed of.)

I checked the Cast family’s bibliography and they’ve been churning out an average of three books a year. They’re up to about 25 published books so far.  So don’t criticise the series until you have tried writing that many books.

In addition to reading or re-reading Marked, Fatima is re-reading Double Cross from Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses series. If you want to find out what that’s about you should cut and paste this link into your browser: www.meettheauthor/bookbites/1225.html and Malorie herself will tell you what the books are all about (not vampires). Malorie – I feel I know her already- has a very nice website: www.malorieblackman.co.uk  and you can correspond with her on Facebook. If you do that, you can tell her that it was my suggestion but please don’t tell her that I haven’t yet read Book 1 Noughts and Crosses. Fatima loaned me her copy and the characters are still there on my bookshelf living out their story – I hear them whispering sometimes late at night. Fatima has made me (almost) swear that I will read the book this summer.

This is the book I promised to read

Let me just check to find out how long Chapter One is …

Is it a cubicle like this?

Apparently they are very excited about their cubicle and are planning what to put inside it (lots of furniture, bean bags and the like) and what to do there (Book Club activities). Well, with all those things going on inside their cubicle there will be even less space. It will be positively cramped in there … dangerously cramped even. I think I will have to go and take a look at this cubicle, get a picture of what is going on and find out why Las Senoras seem to be so enthusiastic about setting up home there.

So, we now have a different format for our meetings. We will be convening on a Sunday afternoon… exams and assignments permitting. Don’t forget that for us Sunday is the first day of the working week, so getting La Senoras together to talk about books is no mean task.

Getting Las Senoras all to read the same book at the same time? Well, no! It isn’t going to happen. But we can get round that and still have a Book Club. Here’s how … every week one or two of us will bring a book that we are reading or that we have read … and we will read an extract to the other Senoras. If someone doesn’t want to read out loud, then I will read their extract for them. So, this way Las Senoras get to be entertained and they get to tell everyone else about their chosen book and what they like … or dislike about it.

In the next post I will tell you about Vanessa’s new leisure reading collection … and what happened when I read Las Senoras an extract from this book.

Until next time, best wishes and read on.

The hero of this tale is Edmond Dantes, a young man who is falsely accused of a crime and imprisoned on a remote island. As you can imagine, his one objective after this is to escape so that he can find and marry his sweetheart Mercedes (no, not the car!) and also take revenge on those who had him thrown into prison. Haleema and I strongly urge you to read the book, but if all else fails … then see the excellent film starring James Cavieziel as Edmond.

Sweet reading!

We talked a great deal about Twilight. And then we talked a great deal about Twilight, and then – you guessed it – we talked a great deal about …  well … Twilight. This obsession was difficult for Vanessa and I to fathom. The first Twilight book does not contain any difficult words or especially long sentences, and yet neither of us could get beyond the first one hundred words. Some of Las Senoras, on the other hand, had read the books – more than one of them – three or four times. How can this be?

The wrath of Las Senoras has fallen on Stephen King, who – as I mentioned in the last post – said that Stephenie Meyer’s writing was ‘not very good.’ There was great indignation on the part of several of Las Senoras about this statement of King’s, which they retained to be a sign of immense arrogance on his part. I defended him, saying that, of course, we did not know the context in which this was said. As you can see from the photo, Stephen is not as pretty as Stephenie, though he does appear to like cats, and this could be a point in his favour. 

Las Senoras did not withhold their scorn for King … after all, what did he know about how to write, and anyway, what was ‘good writing?’ Clearly, then, Stephenie is a good writer – let us overlook the fact that she misspells her name – and Stephen is a bad writer.

So, what is good writing, and what is bad writing? Well, it depends. What is good writing for you, Senoras, may be bad writing for me. What is good writing for me, may be bad writing for you. We talked about ‘page turners’. Twilight is a ‘page turner’ for Las Senoras. They read and turned the pages quickly because it was so interesting. But when Vanessa and I read Twilight, we did not turn the pages quickly because we had already fallen asleep before we had finished the middle paragraph.

For myself I felt rather sorry for Stephen King, and to try and gain some sympathy for him from Las Senoras, I related to them the tale of his terrible accident in June 1999. This he describes in great detail in his book On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft: ‘Writing is not life,’ he says in the book, ‘but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. That was something I found out in the summer of 1999, when a man driving a blue van almost killed me.’ King was out for his daily walk when the van veered off the road and crashed into him. The driver, who had a misbehaving dog with him, had lost control of his vehicle. King continues the story: the driver, ‘told friends that he thought he’d hit “a small deer” until he noticed my bloody spectables lying on the front seat of his van.’

Now, at this point I need to make it clear that for all their talk of Twilight, Las Senoras are in fact remarkably well-read, with perhaps the exception of one Senora who does not read books at all, but likes to hear descriptions of them from her friends. So it was that one of our Senoras told us that Stephen King’s book the Duma Key contains an account of a horrible accident experienced by the protagonist of the story. In telling you this, naturally I am not recommending that you go in search of horrible experiences so that you can write about them. Some of us are now putting Duma Key on our To Read booklists. It sounds intriguing.

On the subject of booklists, Stephen King has one at the back of On Writing. He advises us to ‘write a lot and read a lot.’ Admittedly, booklists worry me slightly, especially when I find that, out of a hundred titles on a list, I’ve only read three … or less.

I’m pleased to announce that Las Senoras have now released their own updated list of recommended reading. There is, however, something a little suspect about this list. Out of 20 suggested titles, seven are by miscellaneous authors, one is by the much-loathed Stephen King, one is by Sidney Sheldon, one is by Charles Dickens, two (only two?) are by Stephenie Meyer. The remaining eight (!) are all by Nicholas Sparks! Now who is the Senora who is sneaking Nicholas Sparks onto our booklist?

What are you reading? What should be on Las Senoras booklist? Post a comment. More about reading tastes – and pizza – in the next post.