We miss our in-person silent book club meetings, at Press and in the park …

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist …)

but as I observed in our last report, gathering around a zoom screen can sometimes be just like gathering around a warm fire in good company. It felt exactly like that again, as we enjoyed a mid-week, evening “pop-up” silent book club meeting this week.

Although it was an evening gathering for most of the attendees, from our local east end Toronto neighbourhood and from other locations around the greater Toronto area, it was a very late evening for one of our newest members, who was joining us from Wales. It was particularly lovely to hear her voice, see her smile and view her cozy, book-lined office … and to realize that an actually very wonderful aspect of how our group has adapted and moved online is that it has given us the opportunity to fling our virtual doors open in this fashion.

Live meetings and the warmth of literally reading together are not in the immediate future, but they’re in all our dreams. At the same time, I hope this extended book club format will still be part of our meeting mix. We’ve made new friends, we’ve expanded our discussions and reading lists … and we’ve used the online realm (and, notably this week, it feels like we’ve reclaimed and redeemed it) to do it.

Without further ado, here is another generous combined reading list from our group. As always, the titles featured in each of our reports combine print and digital versions of books, along with audiobooks (which are indicated separately)

• The Decent Inn of Death by Rennie Airth
• Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
• Dearly by Margaret Atwood
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Penguin Drop Caps edition)
• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
• The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love – Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits by Judson Brewer
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte
• The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
• Seven by Farzana Doctor
• The Belgariad by David Eddings
• Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
• House of Correction by Nicci French
• The End of Me by John Gould
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
• Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
• Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy 2) by Deborah Harkness
• Eventide by Kent Haruf
• Motherhood by Sheila Heti
• One Year at Ellsmere by Faith Erin Hicks
• From Oral to Written, A Celebration of Indigenous Literature in Canada, 1980-2010 by Tomson Highway
• Miss Austen by Gill Hornby, read by Juliet Stevenson (audiobook)
• The Roasting Tin by Rukmini Iyer
• 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act by Bob Joseph
• Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce
• This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
• Marian Keyes on Twitter
• The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune
• The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
• Vienna Melody by Ernst Lothar
• Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli
• The Coffinmaker’s Garden by Stuart MacBride
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel
• Celia’s Song by Lee Maracle
• L.E.L. The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron” by Lucasta Miller
• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
• The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• A Promised Land by Barack Obama
• I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell
• The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• The Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha
• A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny
• Glass Houses by Louise Penny
• Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny
• A Better Man by Louise Penny
• The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
• Women Writers at Work – The Paris Review Interviews, edited by George Plimpton
• How the Penguins Saved Veronica by Hazel Prior
• Bittersweet by Natasha Ramoutar
• The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison
• The Barren Grounds by David A. Robertson
• Testimony by Robbie Robertson
• The Expendables by Jeff Rubin
• Vicious by V.E. Schwab
• The Wonderful Adventures of Suzuki Beane by Sandra Scoppettone & Louise Fitzhugh
• Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
• Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by Rebecca Solnit
• Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
• How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa
• On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey by Paul Theroux
• Helsinki Noir edited by James Thompson
• Vi by Kim Thuy, translated by Sheila Fischman
• Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
• Thick as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner
• Square Haunting by Francesca Wade
• The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
• Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

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

You can also 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.

It’s possible things are going to get darker for a time. We can light our way and our spirits for now with reading and continued connections to our fellow readers.