We aimed, as we’ve done for the last couple of months, to have a two-part silent book club meeting today, first on zoom, then a bit later with a smaller group in person in our local park. Capricious weather cues and conflicting forecasts forced us to call off the much anticipated park visit. As disappointing as that was, the vitality of our zoom meeting – brimming with great reading and listening recommendations and stimulating discussion – was palpable and clearly savoured by all.

While the connections this month were largely online, our trusted recommendation network of book club friends keeps buzzing offline. That network extends to physically distanced discussions and book exchanges. We’re meeting and dropping books off at each other’s homes, and we’re spurring each other to head to library branches and bookstores, and to borrow and purchase online. In bookish terms, our “new normal” is a hybrid of online and offline opportunities to continue to boost and share our collective love of reading … something that has helped, in no small part, to navigate the many “new normals” with which we’re all contending.

Here is our brimming, buzzing, lively combined reading list for this month. The titles featured each month combine print and digital versions of books, along with audiobooks (which are indicated separately).

• This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart by Madhur Anand
• Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Annappara
• The Arabian Nights (aka The Thousand and One Nights)
• The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
• Homes: A Refugee Story by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah and Winnie Yeung
• Behindlings by Nicola Barker
• Life Class by Pat Barker (audiobook)
• Toby’s Room by Pat Barker (audiobook)
• The Expat Files by Ken Becker
• Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
• The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
• Radical Acts of Love by Janie Brown
• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
• Brother by David Chariandy
• Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
• The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
• Had it Coming by Robyn Doolittle, narrated by Alison J Palmer (audiobook)
• American War by Omar El Akkad
• No Authority by Anne Enright
• The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens, narrated by Zach Villa (audiobook)
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo, narrated by Anna Maria Nabirye (audiobook)
• The Swan Suit by Katherine Fawcett
• 52 Times Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught at School by James Felton
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, narrated by Amando Duran (audiobook)
• The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
• We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib
• The Second Sleep by Robert Harris
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf
• Eventide by Kent Haruf
• Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
• The End We Start From by Megan Hunter
• Original Sin by P.D. James
• Need You Dead by Peter James
• The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff
• 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act by Bob Joseph
• The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi, narrated by Sneha Mathan (audiobook)
• A Very Punchable Face by Colin Jost
• Last Impressions by Joseph Kertes
• Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen
• Road Ends by Mary Lawson
• Blood from a Stone by Donna Leon
• Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him by Roy MacGregor
• I’ll Be Gone In the Dark by Michelle McNamara
• Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston
• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
• Weather by Jenny Offill (audiobook)
• The Library Book by Susan Orlean (audiobook)
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny
• All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny
• My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen
• Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson
• Traplines by Eden Robinson
• Blood Sports by Eden Robinson
• Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney, narrated by Xe Sands (audiobook)
• #thesealeychallenge to read 31 works of poetry (one per day) in the month of August
• A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert (audiobook)
• Beautiful Boy by David Sheff
• Summer by Ali Smith
• Crow by Amy Spurway
• The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel
• Olive Again by Elizabeth Strout
• Keep It Moving by Twyla Tharp (audiobook)
• From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle
• The Break by Katherena Vermette
• The Fat Woman’s Joke by Fay Weldon
• Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
• Pride by Ibi Zoboi

Our previous silent book club meeting reports (online and in-person incarnations) and book lists are here.

We’re pleased and honoured to have been interviewed about the silent book club concept and how to start a club of one’s own. You can check out links to articles, CBC Radio interviews and more here – some with San Francisco-based Silent Book Club founders Guinevere de La Mare and Laura Gluhanich, and some with us here in east end Toronto.

Learn more about silent book clubs via Guinevere and Laura’s Silent Book Club web site. You can find information on meetings happening around the world and close to where you live. Some clubs are currently on haitus, but many are running virtual meetings in different formats. Please feel free to contact me for more information about our club and its offerings.

A silent book club meeting with friends and neighbours, held at and in support of a local business exemplifies exactly the kinds of freedoms we are foregoing now to get through these unsettled and unsettling times … and is where we’re all going to want to be when we get through this. Read well where you are now, gather in the ways that are safe and make most sense, including virtually. Be well and let books buoy your spirits, make our ever changing and challenging circumstances more tolerable, and make the time pass swiftly.