The First Monday Book Club took a bit of a hiatus this summer. We decided not to read specific books and skipped our June meeting, but a group of us got together recently to sip wine at Davis-Kidd and catch up on what’s on everyone’s nightstand.

We thought we’d choose the best books from the summer as the basis of our book list when we officially get back together next month; each person chooses their favorite book and leads the discussion when the time comes.

In the past, we’ve mostly looked at a few summaries from online sources and tried to agree on something that sounded good. We’ve mixed in a classic (need to do more of those), some books that were getting a lot of buzz, and several books I’d already read so I could keep participating during an especially demanding grad class. It was time to change it up a bit.

I’ve heard all kinds of ways in which book clubs choose their titles: drawing titles out of hat, taking turns, voting. My co-blogger Bill Frazier (read his posts on American history here) recently gave me a few copies of Bookmarks magazine. In one, a club describes choosing books by “walking the plank” — walking down a book aisle, closing your eyes, reaching out to touch a spine and reading the book you touched. Might be a good way to find a hidden or forgotten gem.

How does your book club choose its selections?

First sentence: When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her.

The First Monday Book Club met on the second Monday this month so the Tigers fans among us could watch the championship game last week. (And here it is Thursday already! I’ve been crazy-busy!) That extra week seemed to help, because we had a good group of folks and everyone had finished “Bel Canto,” which was a good thing, because we talked about the ending first.

In short: We hated the epilogue, but we loved the book.

Ann Patchett has crafted a wondrous novel of art and guns, with so many unlikely pairings and subtle, sometimes humorous, insights into the characters’ personalities that you are quickly enamored, even if a little anxious.

Based loosely on a months-long hostage ordeal in Lima, Peru, the story begins at the vice president’s mansion in a South American country that is trying to woo a Japanese businessman with a party in honor of his birthday. Katsumi Hosokawa, who has an obsession  for opera and no plans whatsoever to build a factory in this country, is lured to the party by the carrot they’ve dangled before him: His favorite opera singer, Roxane Coss, has been secured to sing. The elegant party, filled with diplomats and other important people from many countries, is interrupted by terrorists bent on kidnapping the country’s president, only he’s not there, having bowed out at the last minute to watch a pivotal episode of his favorite soap opera. Unprepared for this development, the terrorists take all 191 guests hostage.

The terrorists soon release the women and children, the ill, and the lesser-known of the diplomats and businessmen, leaving a house full of powerful men in expensive tuxedos and the famous American opera singer as bargaining chips. In the months that follow, unlikely friendships and even love develop between the hostages and the terrorists, two of whom are soon revealed to be young women. It helps that the captives and the captors are now looking at life with the certain clarity one has when faced with one’s own mortality. They find beauty in everything.

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First sentence: It was Edwin who wanted to build a new house.

Love affairs, architecture, fame, feminism, scandal, arson, murder, despair. The true-life story of the ill-fated love between Mamah Borthwick Cheney and famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright is so rich with sexy topics it’s hard to believe it’s barely more than a footnote in most Wright biographies.

It’s even harder to believe it took so long for a writer to mine the story for a novel, but Nancy Horan does it beautifully in her debut work, ”Loving Frank.”

The book took seven years to research and write, and Horan’s meticulous fact-finding and storytelling was rewarded with a spot on the New York Times Bestseller list and an interest from book clubs when it was only out in hardcover. With the release of the paperback today, it will likely become the next book club favorite.

While much is known about Frank Lloyd Wright — his genius, his flamboyance and his ego — Horan chooses to tell the story through the perspective of Mamah Cheney, an intelligent, well-educated woman who embraced feminism and was not content to idly watch her life float by in the genteel Chicago suburb of Oak Park in the early 1900s.

This we know is true: Mamah (pronounced MAY-muh) and Edwin Cheney commissioned a house from Wright. As it was being constructed, Mamah and Wright fell in love. They each abandoned their families — he with six children and she with two — and lived together in Europe for awhile. Edwin Cheney divorced Mamah, but Wright’s wife, Catherine, refused to believe it was more than a fleeting affair and would not grant a divorce. When they returned to the states, they set up house on the Wright family land near Spring Green in Wisconsin. Here is where Wright would build the famous Taliesin for Mamah, and where she would die a few years later at the hands of a crazed, disgruntled worker, who set fire to Taliesin and axed those trying to escape.

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First sentence: I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

I don’t know if it was the weather (raining buckets), the length of the book (500+ pages) or if everyone just needed a break, but our book club meeting Monday was pretty slim. Only three people out of 14 made it to Davis-Kidd to talk about “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides, and only one of us had completed the book; I have to confess, it wasn’t me, although I had only about 100 pages left. (That’s so unlike me, but I had a paper due last week for my comm law class….)

More than those other things, though, I think people just weren’t into the book. Some because of the subject matter, some because it was just hard to get into. It took me three tries to really get interested, and even then, I kind of skimmed over some parts of the first 50 pages until I got to a part that grabbed me. (Then I felt guilty and went back and read everything I skipped.)

The Pulitzer Prize-winner is an epic tale of three generations of a Greek family on a family tree that’s a little bit too intertwined…. A mutant gene, an incestuous marriage and another too-close-for-comfort coupling produce the intersexed Calliope/Callie/Cal, who is raised a girl but whose early teen years become even more confusing when instead of getting her period and breasts, she gets a serious crush on a girl in her class. A trip to the emergency room after an accident begins Callie’s tenure as specimen and freak. Finally, she/he finds it easier — or at least more true to his feelings – to live as a man and becomes Cal, who is the narrator of the story.

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First sentence: Later, when memory was all she had to sustain her, she would come to cherish it: Old Honolulu as it was then, as it would never be again.

My book club meets once a month, and usually I don’t hear too much from the girls until I e-mail them when our meeting is getting near. But everyone was really into “Moloka’i” and kept e-mailing me to say how much they liked it. My friend Janice was out at Pickwick for a long weekend with friends and had to force herself to quit reading so she wouldn’t seem anti-social.

I have to admit I had mixed feelings about reading a book about a leper colony – how depressing could that be? – but author Alan Brennert immediately pulls you in to Rachel Kalama’s life in Honolulu in the late 1800s, and by the time you get to Kalaupapa, there’s no going back.

Brennert did extensive research on the leper colony and how it evolved over the years. Rachel (a fictional character) arrives after the time of Father Damien, the real-life Catholic priest who devoted himself to caring for the exiles on Moloka’i. Brennert expertly mixes the real and the fictional, the folklore and the practical, throughout the novel, and is adept at bringing the characters to life. Some of the members of the book club were impressed that he was able to capture the main characters so well, as most of them are women.

We all felt that we understood Rachel and her many emotions and challenges, and loved her spirit. Sister Catherine, one of the nuns who takes care of the children on the island, is fleshed out with her depression, her doubts and her circuitous travels back to her faith. Even most of the secondary characters are very easy to see as real.

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