The Bibliofillies met for the first time in person since March 2020 tonight on my patio. I had planned to make a light supper for the nine of us, but realized last week when I got the brace on that that wasn’t going to work out. So I asked if we could do a potluck instead, and my wonderful fillies came through like the stars they are, with numerous salads and curried egg salad toasts and homemade pistachio gelato and cupcakes from Blue Sky Baking Company. It was a glorious, balmy evening full of joyful connection, and thoughtful conversation about the book I’d chosen, Klara and the Sun by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. Nobody liked it as well as I did, but the most controversial books usually stimulate the best discussion.
I’m so grateful for our book club! We steadfastly continued to meet through the pandemic via Zoom, and will likely return to that format as this illusory window of normalcy closes on the inevitable Delta variant in our predictably low-vaccinated county. And I’m grateful when we have visitors who have taken the time to also ‘consume’ the book. We discussed whether, if you listen to a book is it still called reading? I think so, but we tossed around some other possible words.
I’m also grateful for my stoic, resilient Stellar Stardog Son of Sundog, who’s been having a good week, so we’ve taken incrementally longer walks each day, shortly after sunrise while it’s still delightful cool. I’m grateful for cool nights. I’m grateful for cool, smooth sheets at the end of a fulfilling day. I wish similar comfort for you.
Books I unearthed while sorting through boxes in the attic…
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:
Portrait of a Lady Henry James
Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
O Pioneers! Willa Cather
A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
The Haunted Monastery, Robert Van Gulik
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
The Cave, Jose Saramago
Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence
A Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
Passionate Nomad, Jane Geniesse
Saving Fish from Drowning, Amy Tan
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
East Wind: West Wind, Pearl S. Buck
The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams, Lynne Withey
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
The Blind Assasin, Margaret Atwood
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris
Arthur and George, Julian Barnes
Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer
The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz
Stories of Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov
Herzog, Saul Bellow
Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie
My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
The Greenlanders, Jane Smiley
The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love, Oscar Hijuelos
White Ghost Girls, Alice Greenway
The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
The Ginseng Hunter, Jeff Talarigo
The Leopard, Guiseppe de Lampedusa
The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
The Quiet Girl, Peter Hoeg
Rabbit is Rich, John Updike
A Mercy, Toni Morrison
Desert, LeClezio
The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
Telex from Cuba, Rachel Kushner
Little Bee, Chris Cleave
That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Olga Grushin
The Appointment, Herta Muller
Vanity Fair, William Thackeray
The Help, Kathyrn Stockett
Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson
Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle, Ingrid Betancourt
Tinkers, Paul Harding
Dog of the South, Charles Portis
Trading Dreams of Midnight, Diane McKinney-Whetstone
Undaunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West, Dorothy Wickenden
The Elephant’s Journey, Jose Saramago
People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
Reader’s choice: Mario Vargas Llosa
Killing Mother, Rita Clagett
Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, Christie Watson
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness, Clay Jenkinson
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt
The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh
The Invisible Ones, Stef Penney
Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith & Love, Dava Sobel
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bolgakov
Room: A Novel, Emma Donoghue
The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje
The Stone Raft, Jose Saramago
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt
Strength in What Remains, Tracy Kidder
Mary Coin, Marisa Silver
The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain
Proust at the Majestic, Richard Davenport-Hines
Remembering Babylon, David Malouf
What Maisie Knew, Henry James
Reader’s choice: Books by Mo Yan
The Sumbally Fallacy, Karen Weinant Gallob
The Emerald Mile, Kevin Fedarko
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Kay Joy Fowler
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Americanah, Chimananda Adichie
Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, Poe Ballantine
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert
The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey
The Emperor of Paris, C.S. Richardson
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Roz Chast
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, Jan-Philipp Sendker
Submergence, J.M. Ledgard
The Antagonist, Lynn Coady
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.