Our end-of-month go-round/roundup meeting with our silent book stalwarts happened in two parts today.

First, we had a morning zoom meeting. That more-than-Brady-Bunch (if you know, you know) set of squares on the screen exuded the usual (because it’s always this way) and special (because it’s always that, too) warmth, connection and insight that our group of astute readers always offers.

Second, we had a small afternoon in-person meeting at a local (to east end Toronto) cafe. If you follow our group’s updates, you know that the start of our now six years as a silent book club group brimmed with wonderful in-person meetings supporting local businesses and locations. Like many, we pivoted to online during the pandemic and garnered great benefits from that, including new reading friends far away and opportunities for meetings devoted to discussions about books in addition to time allotted to just read. But that power and glory of readers just connecting and reading together … well, we recaptured a bit of that today.

… and it’s all left me, group organizer and awestruck fellow reader, wobbly with delight. So much so that I didn’t collect a lot of images and illustrations of the experience … although I do think the picture below of open books, rapt readers bent over them and sunlight streaming across coffee shop tables kind of says it all.

Many thanks to East Toronto Coffee Co for a lovely corner of their cozy cafe, in which we happily and gently restarted our in-person silent book club tradition. We look forward to returning there again very soon!

In addition to our monthly go-round meetings, we continue to devote a second meeting every month to a bookish topic of discussion. The topic of this month’s themed discussion meeting was:

Do author interviews (before? during? after? audio/video versus print?) affect how you feel about that author’s books?

The short answer is “Yes to all of the above”. The longer answer is, not surprisingly, richer and more nuanced. Sometimes interviews affect our feelings about an author’s books, for good or not-so-good, meaning it might turn one off from pursuing other works by that author. But then again, it depends on the type and quality of interview and how thorough and trustworthy the interviewer is. (Also not surprisingly, Eleanor Wachtel’s name came up more than once!)

Perfectly timed for our discussion of this topic was author Anne Michaels’ interview on CBC’s Q. In it, she remarks on why she is quite private about her own life, in part because she doesn’t want it to intrude upon or displace the reader’s experience of what she has written.

You are going to love our group’s latest combined book list, with collects up books mentioned and discussed by the end of our November 2023 meeting. Each list reflects the reading of many of our members, so dedicated to the group that they regularly provide their reading lists even when they can’t attend a meeting. The titles featured in each of our reports encompass print and digital versions of books, along with audiobooks.

Any title on any of our group’s lists means that at least one (but usually more) readers have given that title some consideration. That’s encouragement for you and other readers checking out our reports and lists to consider it, too. Is that a recommendation? It might be, but not exactly or necessarily. Inclusion on this list always means that a title has been given thoughtful consideration and attention by our readers, which you can be assured counts for a lot.

• Son of Elsewhere by Elamin Abdelmahmoud (audiobook)
• Masala Lab: The Science of Indian Cooking by Krish Ashok
• Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton
• Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
• Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (audiobook)
• A Possible Trust by Ronna Bloom
• A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne
• This Road I Ride: Sometimes It Takes Losing Everything to Find Yourself by Juliana Buhring
• Where There’s a Will: Hope, Grief and Endurance in a Cycle Race Across a Continent by Emily Chappell
• On Palestine by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé
• Books by Jenny Colgan
• Other Ways to Win: A competitive cyclist’s reflections on success by Lee Craigie
• Sharp Notions, edited by Marita Dachsel and Nancy Lee
• The Librarianist by Patrick de Witt
• A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble
• The Pachinko Parlor by Elisa Shua Dusapin
• Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey
• The Observer by Marina Endicott
• How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
• I Only Read Murder by Will Ferguson and Ian Ferguson
• Notre Dame – A short history of the meaning of cathedrals by Ken Follett
• The Ensemble by Aja Gabel, narrated by Rebecca Lowman (audiobook)
• Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
• Rebellion Box by Hollay Ghadery
• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann, narrated by Will Patton, Ann Marie Lee, Danny Campbell (audiobook)
• The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths, narrated by Sarah Feathers, Anjana Vasan, Esther Wane, Andrew Wincott (audiobook)
• The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths
• So to Speak by Terrance Hayes
• The Art of Being a Tourist at Home: Expand Your World Without Leaving Your Home Town by Jenny Herbert
• The Song of Kahunsha by Anosh Irani
• The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
• None of this is true by Lisa Jewell
• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
• So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
• The Feast by Margaret Kennedy, narrated by Colin Mace (audiobook and ebook)
• Doctor Sleep by Stephen King, narrated by Will Patton (audiobook)
• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
• Rombo by Esther Kinsky, translated by Caroline Schmidt
• Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
• In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune
• Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald (audiobook)
• The Only Café by Linden MacIntyre, narrated by Greg Campbell (audiobook)
• Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh
• Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy
• This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America by Navied Mahdavian
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield, edited by Lorna Sage
• Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Wonderful, Wacky Family by Amy Newmark
• What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez
• Rememberings by Sinéad O’Connor
• Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
• The Diary of Samuel Pepys (abridged / audiobook)
• Neglected No More by Andre Picard
• Outsider – An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past by Brett Popplewell
• The SunPedal Ride: India: 79 Days, 7424 kilometres, a Solar Awareness Mission by Sushil Reddy
• Tatouine by Jean-Christophe Réhel, narrated by Adam Kenneth Wilson (audiobook)
• The Hole by Jose Revueltas
• The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker
• Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
• Good Bones by Maggie Smith
• The Fraud by Zadie Smith
• Unchained: One Woman, One Bike, One Dream … One World by Rubina Soorty
• The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches by Gaetan Soucy
• By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, A Life by Rosemary Sullivan
• Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki
• At Mrs Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor
• The Mysteries by Bill Watterson
• My Murder by Katie Williams
• The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, narrated by Pippa Bennett-Warner (audiobook)
• Hurdy Gurdy by Christopher Wilson
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester (audiobook)
• I Am A Truck by Michelle Winters
• Magnificant Rebels: The first romantics and the invention of self by Andrea Wulf
• An Immense World by Ed Yong

Here are some extra book-related articles, resources, news and recommendations. These items and tidbits are often companions to books on the list, or are inspired or offered by our members and/or come up during our discussions and chat.

• “Why not? Why sniff? Why not just like, congratulate people or cheer them on as they’re reading?”
  Our group can confirm: audiobooks are books, given attention equal to physical books in all our meetings and on our reading lists.
• The reader who spoke today about An Immense World by Ed Yong learned about it from Science Friday.
• Silent Book Club headquarters has some cute merch, if you need to confirm your bookishness quietly while still making a clear statement.
• Take a look at the New York Public Library Best of 2023 Lists.

Did we mention that the worldwide Silent Book Club network recently welcomed its 500th chapter?!? It had around 60 chapters when we joined as the first Toronto chapter in 2017.

You can always find our previous reports and book lists right here, growing every month.

You can also check out links to articles, 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. Every club is a different size, format (in-person, virtual or combinations) and vibe, so contact a club’s organizers beforehand if you have any questions or preferences. Please feel free to contact me for more information about our club and its offerings.

As a silent book club group member, I am so many kinds of fortunate. Not only do I wish all readers all kinds of great reading, but I also wish you the blessing of a circle of great fellow readers – close at hand and in person, and far flung, virtual and just as connected – to make all of your reading experiences powerful and glorious.