Looking to connect with some fellow Calgarians and talk about books while you do it? Join us at the Working Words Book Club! Books and wine—a perfect pairing.
We meet on the 4th Tuesday of the month after work for a discussion and a glass of wine.
Please join us if you’re interested, even if you don’t finish the book. (Yet be prepared for some spoilers!) Space is limited, so please reserve your spot using the Google Form in the registration link below.
Questions or suggestions? Email Marlies.
The details
- Time: Meet at 5:30 pm on the fourth Tuesday of the month (changing to the second Tuesday of the month starting in September).
- Location: Hosted by Unfiltered Wine Bar (1020 14 St SW).
- Books: If you decide to buy your book from Shelf Life Books, you can get a 10% discount by telling them you’re part of the book club.
- Cost: No fee to join or reserve your spot.
- Discussion: Marlies will start things off, but come with your ideas, questions, and stories.
The dates and books
~August 25, 2026~
Book: Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary
Reserve you spot: Registration link
In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. As conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind. An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This vivid and unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge.
~September, 8 2026~
*NOTE: We are changing it up! We’re meeting the second Tuesday of the month starting in September.
Book: How to Survive a Bear Attack by Claire Cameron
Reserve your spot: Registration link (will open August 26)
Seamlessly weaving together nature writing with true crime investigation in this unflinching account of recovery, How to Survive a Bear Attack is at once an intimate portrait of an extraordinary animal, a bracing chronicle of pain, obsession, and love, and a profoundly moving exploration of how we can understand and survive the wildness that lives inside us.
~October, 13 2026~
Book: Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Reserve your spot: Registration link (will open September 9)
Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. As the day’s work grinds on, the friction between Ning’s two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning. Told over a single day, with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Colour confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa’s place as literature’s premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.
~November, 10 2026~
Book: Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker
Reserve your spot: Registration link (will open October 14)
Back by popular demand … and because we seem to bring this book up at every meeting … we’re going back to where we started: We’re reading Cork Dork!
With boundless curiosity, humor, and a healthy dose of skepticism, Bosker takes the reader inside underground tasting groups, exclusive New York City restaurants, California mass-market wine factories, and even a neuroscientist’s fMRI machine as she attempts to answer the most nagging question of all: What’s the big deal about wine? What she learns will change the way you drink wine—and, perhaps, the way you live—forever.