Book Club & English Tea Party

As I mentioned in my previous post, my book club just finished reading Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.  We met tonight to discuss the novel, and in honor of the English setting, we decided to have a tea party.  I made a pie, Annie made scones, and Jill brought several different varieties of tea.  There were seven of us.  The talk was lively, the smell of the teas was heavenly, and the scones were delicious!  Tonight was SO much fun.  My house still bears the lingering scent of the teas and oh, I wish it would smell this way all the time!  We all had such fun that it seems the tea party is going to become a staple in our gatherings, and that makes me happy.
For next month, we're going to read Heaven Is For Real by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent.  For the month following that, we'll read Jane Eyre (which I have read previously and loved.)  Then for October, we'll read Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.  I've never read any of Agatha Christie's work, but having seen several of her Poirot mysteries performed for the BBC's "Masterpiece Mystery" television series, my interest has been piqued and I am very much looking forward to that read!

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I decided, since the Disney bio is taking me so long, to pick up another book at the same time. I've always been a one-at-a-time reader, but I'm going to try this. Maybe when I don't feel like reading the biography, I'll feel like reading the novel instead. The novel of choice is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It is a classic and I've felt ashamed for a long time that I've not yet picked it up. I've had it on my shelf for ages, but just never got around to it. I'm going to right that wrong now :-)

*source*

I'd like to add a bit of an aside here. I've long been annoyed with the practice of people replacing curse words with the first letter (ex. "effing"). If you're going to say it, just say it. Preferably, though, don't say it at all. I'm guilty of cursing, too, but I don't like to, and while I don't take personal offense, I'd rather not hear it, either. However, I'm more bothered by people making lame attempts to mask the words than I am by the words themselves. All this sprung from something in the Editor's note in this book:

"The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent people are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does - what feeling it spares - what horror it conceals." Currer Bell (a.k.a. Charlotte Brontë)