Find and Remind, Part Two: Now With Book Suggestions!

Last month I wrote about Find and Remind, a “planner” site for which I’m a “mombassador.”

As you may or may not recall, I admitted in that post that I’m a dope. With no brain cells for remembering stuff, and generally a forgetful dip.

I referenced my friend Lori, who is my hard drive and expressed concern that something might happen to her, leaving me alone to remember my own things, which will just never do.

So I joined Find and Remind to help me replace Lori.

And it’s been going fairly well, with me signing up my daughters’ kindergarten and second grade classes to eliminate the constant back and forth emails the teachers send with the yada yada responses the parents send. I also signed up Toots’ Brownie troop, and added a fancy scheduling option allowing people to sign up for Girl Scout cookie sales. With all these groups I created, I entered important dates on the calendar and posted group messages that allow everyone to see replies in one place, instead of shuffling through email after email.

As I once mentioned, Find and Remind is a lot like a friendlier Google Group geared toward parents to help communicate with specified group members, schedule playdates, carpools, school events, and so on.

Well the thing is, due to my general dopiness, I forgot to keep entering stuff. And I thought I’d have to email Find and Remind and tell them I just can’t seem to get it together and I’m sorry you once liked me.

But then! I discovered the thing that I CAN do: Schedule my book club.

Look, I know this post is all over the place, but I felt it’s important for me to illustrate my overall state of mind and freneticism so you can truly appreciate the road I’ve traveled to getting it somewhat together.

See, my book club is my heart. I love it with undue passion. But lately? It’s been falling apart. There are six of us and we have our schedules and our traveling across the country in RVs and our probably-going-to-get-married-soons. Also, I haven’t been reading the books, a minor detail I will gloss over with who, me? aplomb. Still, we continue to make plans to meet, only to have them fall apart with a disconcerting crash. Most recently we were to meet last night to discuss “Atlas Shrugged” and only two people could make it so we had to cancel.

So what I did see is put everybody on Find and Remind so I could send group messages from there, list our books, use the calendar, and kick some butts. And you know what else I did? I just pulled a March meeting date out of my addled brain and stuck it on the schedule and wrote “THIS IS THE DAY WE ARE MEETING.”

I have yet to hear back, but I’m assuming everyone loves my taking the club by the horns and pulling us up by the bootstraps.

So the point is that even I can plan things, and sometimes it might take a bit of time to find my planning mojo and it might not be for Brownies or classes or life overall, but when it comes to books? I will make it work.

As a value-add to this post, I thought I’d list some of the books my club has read and enjoyed:

1. The Cellist of Sarajevo (Poetic, haunting, lyrical)

2. Suite Francaise (Amazing work given it was supposed to be a rough draft and discovered years later after the author passed away at Auschwitz.)

3. The Book Thief (I reference this one a lot, I adore it. It’s deeply affecting.)

4. The Snow Leopard (Nature non-fiction that reads partly like an adventure tale, partly like a soap opera. Although the author seemed majorly self-involved, he wrote beautifully about his quest to find the Himalayan snow leopard.)

5. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (Such a fascinating look at the impact Captain Cook had on so many regions.)

6. A Reliable Wife (Part human story, part mystery, all eminently readable.)

Leave any book suggestions below for my book club and I! I’ll add the titles to Find and Remind and make my group read them! Because of that horns-and-bootstraps thing I said above that makes no sense.