I’m grateful for books. I’m grateful that my big brother taught me to read when I was just three years old. I remember sitting on the floor in the doorway between the well-lit kitchen and the dim living room where our parents sat, with a book between us, and him teaching me to make sense of the letters. I’m grateful that I love to read, that I have always loved to read, that my parents gave me lots of books, and that I have always had access to anything I could wish to read. I’m grateful that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, and grateful that someone (though it’s not clear exactly who) invented the novel. I’m grateful for bookbindings, libraries, magazines, and Kindle, and for paper and ink, typewriters, and Pages.

Today I’m grateful for the Bibliofillies, a bookclub Ellie started in April 2005, which has always had a cap of ten people, and still retains five founding members. There are currently nine of us, and we all live in the outskirts of our little town. For all those years we’ve met on the first Wednesday evening of each month, rotating among our homes, and our format has evolved through the years but a few things have remained constant.

We start each meeting with an author report by the hostess. OK, one thing has remained constant! There was a time when the hostess often chose to make a full meal for the group, but it’s always been ok to serve chips and dip instead. In summer we’ve met on patios, in winter we’ve carpooled through deep snow. Since Covid, we’ve met monthly on Zoom, and here’s the second thing that’s constant: the camaraderie that has developed among us through the years.

The first book we read was Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, a novel published in 1881. I remember meeting in Connie’s cozy adobe living room, and there was much dissent about the book. It was a good realization that we can sometimes have even more engaging conversations if we don’t all feel the same about a book. Since then, we’ve had an ongoing discussion on “What is Literature?” One husband calls us “The Smarty Pants Bookclub,” because there’s another book club in town, which many call “The Fun Bookclub.”

I can’t remember half of these, but here’s a (nearly complete) list of the books we read in our first ten years together:

1. Portrait of a Lady Henry James
2. Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
3.  O Pioneers! Willa Cather 
4.   A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
5. Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia 
6. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
7. The Haunted Monastery, Robert Van Gulik 
8. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe 
9. The Cave, Jose Saramago 
10. Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence 
11. A Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata 
12. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
13. Passionate Nomad, Jane Geniesse 
14. Saving Fish from Drowning, Amy Tan 
15. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
16. East Wind: West Wind, Pearl S. Buck
17. The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham
18. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
19. Dearest Friend:  A Life of Abigail Adams, Lynne Withey
20. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe 
21. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami 
22. The Blind Assasin, Margaret Atwood 
23. Dakota:  A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris 
24. Arthur and George, Julian Barnes 
25. Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer 
26. The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz  
27. Stories of Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov 
28. Herzog, Saul Bellow 
29. Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie
30. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk
31. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner 
32. In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant 
33. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
34. To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee 
35. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller 
36. Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett 
37. The Greenlanders, Jane Smiley 
38. The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love, Oscar Hijuelos 
39. White Ghost Girls, Alice Greenway
40. The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty
41. Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
42. Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing 
43. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde 
44. The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
45. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis 
46. The Ginseng Hunter, Jeff Talarigo 
47. The Leopard, Guiseppe de Lampedusa 
48. The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney 
49. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery 
50. The Quiet Girl, Peter Hoeg 
51. Rabbit is Rich, John Updike
52. A Mercy, Toni Morrison
53. Desert, LeClezio
54. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
55. The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
56. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
57. The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
58. The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
59. Telex from Cuba, Rachel Kushner
60. Little Bee, Chris Cleave
61. That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo
62. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
63. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
64. The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Olga Grushin
65. The Appointment, Herta Muller
66. Vanity Fair, William Thackeray
67. The Help, Kathyrn Stockett
68. Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese
69. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson
70. Even Silence Has an End:  My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle, Ingrid Betancourt
71. Tinkers, Paul Harding
72. Dog of the South, Charles Portis
73. Trading Dreams of Midnight, Diane McKinney-Whetstone  
74. Undaunted:  The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West, Dorothy Wickenden
75. The Elephant’s Journey, Jose Saramago
76. People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
77. Reader’s choice: Mario Vargas Llosa
78. Killing Mother, Rita Clagett
79. Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, Christie Watson
80. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
81. The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness, Clay Jenkinson
82. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford
83. The Swerve:  How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt
84. The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh
85. The Invisible Ones, Stef Penney
86. Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith & Love, Dava Sobel
87. State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
88. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bolgakov
89. Room: A Novel, Emma Donoghue
90. The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
91. The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje
92. The Stone Raft, Jose Saramago
93. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt
94. Strength in What Remains, Tracy Kidder
95. Mary Coin, Marisa Silver
96. The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain
97. Proust at the Majestic, Richard Davenport-Hines
98. Remembering Babylon, David Malouf
99. What Maisie Knew, Henry James
100. Reader’s choice: Books by Mo Yan
101. The Sumbally Fallacy, Karen Weinant Gallob
102. The Emerald Mile, Kevin Fedarko
103. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Kay Joy Fowler
104. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
105. Americanah, Chimananda Adichie
106. Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, Poe Ballantine
107. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
108. A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
109. The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert
110. The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey
111. The Emperor of Paris, C.S. Richardson
112. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Roz Chast
113. The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, Jan-Philipp Sendker
114. Submergence, J.M. Ledgard
115. The Antagonist, Lynn Coady
116. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty 

Who can say we’re not fun? Now, I don’t have permission, so I can’t share the screenshot I took of us toward the end of our meeting tonight. It’s not Wednesday, you might be thinking if you’re on your toes: No, but last Wednesday we were derailed by circumstances beyond our control, which several wanted to keep watching on their screens, so this was our makeup meeting. If I could, I’d share the screenshot, and prove to everyone that we are too fun! Last month we read Louise Erdrich’s dystopian novel “Future Home of the Living God,” which started out a page turner, and ended up a colossally distressing parallel, in some ways, to our own current precarious political and societal cusp between democracy and fascism.

None of us gave the book a full Thumbs Up, and several gave it a solid Thumbs Down, and after a record-short discussion there was a pause that cried for some levity. I put on a pig nose and ears, and gave a tutorial on Zoom video filters, and soon we were all laughing. Rosie sat by the seaside with a pirate patch and hat, Candy wore a mustache with the cosmos behind her. Many combinations of backgrounds, frames, antlers, hats, noses, spectacles and hirsute adornments later, we called it a night. Smarty pants indeed! I am indeed grateful for my smarty-pants, big-hearted, open-minded, thoughtful and funny Bibliofillies.