Rubyfruit Book Club
JUNE
READ
THURSDAY
JUNE 5th
5PM
Books We Love
Our team has plenty of favorites to share. From owners to bartenders to chefs, explore the stories that inspire us. Whether you’re looking for a thought-provoking read or just a new favorite, you might find your next great book here.
Share your Favorites
Reading is better when we do it together. Each month, our members vote on what we’ll read next, ensuring a diverse and engaging lineup. Got a book you’re dying to discuss? Nominate it and make your voice heard.
Gather, Sip, Discuss
Our book club meetups aren’t your average literary analysis—think of them as lively, thought-provoking conversations over drinks in a warm, inviting space. Whether you’re here to unpack big themes, or soak in the atmosphere, you’re always welcome.
Pick Our Next Read
Butter Honey Pig Bread
by Francesca Ekwuyasi
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award, Governor General's Literary Award, and Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
“Francesca Ekwuyasi captivates us in her novel Butter Honey Pig Bread with tantalizing food while journeying us through a story of memory, myth, and severed kinship. This debut by the multidisciplinary artist, longlisted for the Giller, is both lyrical and daring. See-sawing through the trisecting protagonists—adult twins Kehinde and Taiye, Nigerian students studying abroad in Montreal and Halifax, respectively, and their dynamic mother Kambirinachi, living in Lagos, Nigeria—this read offers us high stakes and sweet rewards.
The novel’s opening is pulsing with tension: estranged Kehinde and Taiye travel from Canada to Lagos to visit their mother, carrying with them deep-seated anxieties, angers, and apologies. But it must be said, we cannot talk about Butter Honey Pig Bread without talking about food.
Food is most obviously present in Taiye’s vignettes, who is half aspiring chef, half hapless glutton. The intricate way food is prepared through the writing resonates deeply for us as readers, particularly those who are diasporic and see the brilliance that Ekwuyasi employs, knowing that food is in itself another language. When words fail, a hot meal, a baked cake, or a shared cup of tea can open space or can be a peace offering. This type of language acts as entry point for much more layered and complex relationship building that has been compounded by familial collective trauma and the realities of being dispersed. Food’s language carves tenderness in the afterlife of distance.”
-from Making Food, Making Fury: Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread
By Whitney French
Madness, Rack, and Honey
by Mary Ruefle
In many ways, “Madness, Rack, and Honey” reads like a steroid-boosted version of a commonplace book, those thinking persons’ scrapbooks that became popular in early modern Europe and contained quotations from the classics, scraps of conversation, poem fragments, recipes, proverbs and lists of every sort. With all of Ruefle’s borrowings and rephrasings, it’s difficult sometimes to tell exactly who’s talking, which may be the idea. One authority burrows into another, as when the painter Cy Twombly is cited as quoting the poet John Crowe Ransom’s assertion that “the image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness which ideas can never claim.” I believe the rappers call this “sampling.”
Alternately smart and silly, Ruefle is best when combining those two properties — dismissing the idea of theme in literature, for instance, by asking what it would be like to organize her books in terms of their themes. (She’d have to buy three copies of some so they’d fit into the different sections of her library, and saw others in half.) Yet at times she lays out ideas with a Zen minimalism, as when she notes the most important fact about our greatest playwright: “In the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn’t even speak.”
Yet out of that baby came “King Lear,” and out of other babies came the Declaration of Independence, the formula for Prozac, the business plan for Microsoft. Nothing in this book argues the “supreme importance of poetry to human civilization,” to borrow Robert Hass’s facetious phrase; everything in it argues the supreme importance of humans to civilization. Poets, women who sell makeup in department stores, night-duty attendants: we need them all. And there’d be a whole lot more civilization out there if we were all as knowing and merry as these essays.
Rubyfruit Jungle
by Rita Mae Brown
A landmark coming-of-age novel that launched the career of one of this country’s most distinctive voices, Rubyfruit Jungle remains a transformative work since its original publication almost fifty years ago.
In bawdy, moving prose, Rita Mae Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a dirt-poor Southern couple who boldly forges her own path in America. With her startling beauty and crackling wit, Molly finds that women are drawn to her wherever she goes - and she refuses to apologize for loving them back.
This literary milestone continues to resonate with its message about being true to yourself and, against the odds, living happily ever after.
Join Our First Meeting!
June 5 at 5PM at Queeny’s
Notes of a Crocodile
by Qiu Miaojin
First published in Taiwan in 1994, and released in English in late 2017, Notes of a Crocodile is narrated by a young woman known as Lazi, a student at the prestigious National Taiwan University. The novel examines Lazi’s feelings about her attraction to women and charts her tumultuous relationship with Shui Ling, a fellow student.
It also follows the lives of Lazi’s friends, who, like her, struggle to define their sexual identity in the face of homophobia, family dysfunction, and crushing academic pressure. All the while, the book offers sharp insights on living outside the bounds of social acceptability in the late 1980s.
FAQs
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Sign up for the emails using the form at the top of this page, read the book and show up!
We look forward to connecting with you!
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When we send an email with the next book pick, there will be a link to click if you’d like us to get you a new copy - they’ll be 25% off list price! You are also welcome to track down your own copy or audiobook.
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We’re reading adult books at the moment, but teenagers are welcome!
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Yes! Some of us will be eating/drinking, but starting a tab is optional!