The holiday season is meant to bring us peace and joy. Here’s hoping that been largely fulfilled so far, but of course the season can be fraught, too. I hope this bonus silent book club in the midst of the season brought some peace where other aspects of the holidays perhaps demanded too much or did not meet expectations. The warm conversation and the relaxed faces bent over books and reading devices suggest this extra gathering was most beneficial.

With pending new year’s resolutions on some minds, some titles discussed and read today are perhaps inspirational fodder, everything from 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food and Zero Waste to My Year of Living Spiritually and The Art of Living.

One silent book club member finished her year having completed a long term goal to read all of the CBC Canada Reads winning books. Well done!

Our silent book club members regularly inspire and challenge each other every month, in a variety of ways. Last month, I mentioned that I was rereading a favourite novel, which encouraged other members to revisit old favourites this month.

So devoted are our regular silent book club members that one of them emailed in a report of what she was reading while she was in the midst of her holiday travels. It was great to have her virtually at the table and to be able to picture her reading her book on a train travelling through mountains on the U.S. west coast as we gathered in our beloved coffee shop/bookstore in east end Toronto.

The following is this gathering’s gorgeous cascade of bookish delights. This list, presented after every gathering, is not only a service to everyone who attends in person, but it’s meant to extend what we share at each meeting to a virtual network of fellow readers – so enjoy! Each title links to additional information about the book, either from the publisher, from articles about the book or author, or from generally positive and/or constructive reviews.

• Walk Through Walls by Marina Abramovic
• 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food by Susan Albers
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
• The Baffler
• The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett
• My Year of Living Spiritually by Anne Bokma
• The Orenda by Joseph Boyden
• Welcome To The Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear And Finding Home In The Great White North by Blair Braverman
• Canada Reads winners
• Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier
• Just One Look by Harlan Coben
• Scar Lover by Harry Crews
• Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
• Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott
• Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Illustrated Edition) by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Elise Hurst
• Too Close to the Falls by Catherine Gildiner
• After the Falls by Catherine Gildiner
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Help, Thanks, Wow – The Three Essential Prayers by Ann Lamott
• Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin
• That Time I Loved You by Carrianne Leung
• Female Fortune by Jill Liddington
• An Invitation to Celtic Wisdom: A Little Guide to Mystery, Spirit, and Compassion by Carl McColman
• Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
• I.M. by Isaac Mizrahi
• The Paris Review
• At Knit’s End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
• The books of Louise Penny
• Popshot Quarterly
• The German Midwife by Mandy Robotham
• The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
• Calypso by David Sedaris
• Swing Time by Zadie Smith
• Zero Waste by Shia Su
• Blood in the Water by Heather Ann Thompson
• The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
• Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan
• Crow Gulch by Douglas Walbourne-Gough
• Carsick by John Waters
• The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West
• Worry by Jessica Westhead
• Who Do We Choose To Be? Facing Reality | Claiming Leadership | Restoring Sanity by Margaret J. Wheatley

As always, you can catch up on our previous silent book club meeting reports and book lists 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.

• CBC Radio’s Ontario Morning (starting at 41:20)
• CBC Toronto web site
• a series of interviews across Canada with CBC Radio, including Toronto’s Here and Now
• The Christian Science Monitor – Witty banter optional: The no-pressure, no-homework book club

San Francisco-based Silent Book Club founders Guinevere de La Mare and Laura Gluhanich were most recently featured in a wonderful piece on the NPR web site (yes, National Public Radio, thank you very much!). Extensive and enthusiastic coverage silent book club coverage includes this piece in the February 2019 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine, describing the club’s genesis and extolling its virtues as the concept and clubs spread worldwide.

Our dear friends at Press books. coffee. vinyl. thanked us with holiday greetings (and chocolate!) for continuing to make them our bookish and comfy home away from home for all our silent book club meetings.

There is no place we’d rather be, Press! (We suspect our perfect silent book club setting is the envy of other groups …) Thank you!

If you’ve so far enjoyed the silent book club experience virtually, might you resolve in the new year to experience it firsthand? 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. If you’re interested in starting your own silent book club or are in the Toronto area and perhaps interested in checking ours out, check out the resources on the Silent Book Club web site, or please feel free to contact me for more information.

With brimming book bags and hearts – not to mention dripping umbrellas – we assembled today for a pre-holiday season silent book club meeting. Respite perhaps from the pre-holiday season rushing and demands, let’s hope the tendrils of peace each silent book club meeting trails behind it might get us all through the holiday season. Certainly, there will be books in stockings and under trees with which we can individually recreate the delicious silent book club experience if we can’t get together in person.

Some meetings, interesting threads wend their way through our discussions and recommendations. This meeting, punctuation emerged as a recurring theme, ranging from Nicola Barker’s impeccable but sometimes jarring uses of punctuation (and capitalization) in Burley Cross Postbox Theft, to Ali Smith’s lack of quotation marks in Autumn to Gary Barwin’s unique veneration of punctuation in print and imagery in For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems.

How text and imagery intersect and complement each other came up in several readers’ highlights this month. In addition to the aforementioned For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe, one reader praised the beautiful melding of images with poetry and flash fiction in Popshot Quarterly. Another reader pointed out the power of the message in YA graphic novel Take It as a Compliment by Maria Stoian. Yet another reader remarked on the memorable collaboration of writer Michael Crummey and photographer Greg Locke in Newfoundland: Journey into a Lost Nation. And not to give too much away, but this holiday season some lucky recipients will be unwrapping Richard Wagamese’s One Drum, his posthumous volume of stories and ceremonies, because the wise giver was inspired after seeing the beautiful book, complete with colour photographs, at a previous silent book club meeting.

Strong women are at the forefront of many of the books highlighted and discussed this month, too many (how wonderful!) to encapsulate in one paragraph. Take a look at the list below, click on the links (which are always provided with additional book details and/or informative summaries and reviews) … and prepare to be warmed and inspired by the incredible feminine presence, fictional, spiritual, historical, contemporary and more, glowing through with such intensity in what we were able to cover in just a little over an hour’s discussion, thank you very much.

After more than two years of gathering for our monthly meetings, our silent book club group has grown very generous and trusting with sharing books. Volumes cross the table and make the rounds regularly. We’re now at a point where, after a book has passed through several pairs of hands, we often lose track of how the book originally came to the group. Because we’re in a neighbourhood well populated with lovingly curated Little Free Library boxes, it’s easy to drop off books from our group on the way home from meetings, so they continue to find new readers. This month, one of our readers took time to pay tribute to the Little Free Library concept and movement.

That same reader also took time to applaud another local treasure, Firefly Creative Writing, which is just a few blocks west of where we meet at Press books. coffee. vinyl. for our silent book club meetings. In addition to their warm and encouraging creative writing workshops, Firefly offers a periodic email newsletter with poems, thoughts on writing and more. This neighbourhood has some magical undercurrent of books and words and readers and writers happening, it seems …

On that cheery note, here is today’s diverse list of books presented with enthusiasm and delight during the discussion portion of the meeting, and read with equal pleasure and absorption during the cozy silent portion (yes, we do eventually stop talking …!) of the meeting.

• Big Sky by Kate Atkinson
• Bunny by Mona Awad (audiobook)
• Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker
• For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems by Gary Barwin
• Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
• My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
• Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole
• The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson (audiobook)
• Dear Everybody: A Woman’s Journey from Park Avenue to a Labrador Trap Line by Anne Budgell
• The Long Call by Ann Cleeves
• The Innocents by Michael Crummey
• Newfoundland: Journey into a Lost Nation by Michael Crummey and Greg Locke
• My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel
• Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
• Akin by Emma Donoghue (audiobook)
• A Nearly Normal Family by M.T. Edvardsson
• The Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards
• Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
• Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
• Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott
• Suicide Murders by Howard Engel
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
• Pilgrim by Timothy Findley
• Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
• Too Close to the Falls by Catherine Gildiner
• Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris
• A Woman Among Warlords by Malalai Joya
• Nina is Not OK by Shappi Khorsandi
• The Wheel of Life – A Memoir of Living and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Let’s Talk About Race by Julius Lester, illustrated by Karen Barbour
• That Time I Loved You by Carrianne Leung
• Female Fortune by Jill Liddington
• The Black House by Peter May
• Crow Winter by Karen McBride
• An Invitation to Celtic Wisdom: A Little Guide to Mystery, Spirit, and Compassion by Carl McColman
• Circe by Madeline Miller
• The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Huraki Murakami
• Knife by Jo Nesbø
• Becoming by Michelle Obama
• An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny
• A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny
• A Better Man by Louise Penny
• Popshot Quarterly
• Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney
• The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (audiobook, narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch)
• Calypso by David Sedaris
• Autumn by Ali Smith
• Swing Time by Zadie Smith
• Take It as a Compliment by Maria Stoian
• On the Come Up by Angie Thomas
• Advice for Future Corpses by Sallie Tisdale
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• One Drum by Richard Wagamese
• Reproduction by Ian Williams
• The Power of the Dog, The Cartel and The Border by Don Winslow
• Dear Girls by Ali Wong (audiobook)

Enjoy our previous silent book club meeting reports and book lists 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.

• CBC Radio’s Ontario Morning (starting at 41:20)
• CBC Toronto web site
• a series of interviews across Canada with CBC Radio, including Toronto’s Here and Now
• The Christian Science Monitor – Witty banter optional: The no-pressure, no-homework book club

San Francisco-based Silent Book Club founders Guinevere de La Mare and Laura Gluhanich were most recently featured in a wonderful piece on the NPR web site (yes, National Public Radio, thank you very much!). Extensive and enthusiastic coverage silent book club coverage includes this piece in the February 2019 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine, describing the club’s genesis and extolling its virtues as the concept and clubs spread worldwide.

If you’ve so far enjoyed the silent book club experience virtually, might you resolve in the new year to experience it firsthand? 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. If you’re interested in starting your own silent book club or are in the Toronto area and perhaps interested in checking ours out, check out the resources on the Silent Book Club web site, or please feel free to contact me for more information.

The title of this blog post kind of says it all. We’ve been meeting with friends, neighbours and fellow booklovers who have quickly become friends once or twice a month to share our reading enthusiasms and challenges, in the cozy confines of a favourite local coffee/vinyl/book haven … for two years! Here is to many more – friends, books, chai lattes, scones and more.

(Photo by Jo Nelson)

Without further ado, here is today’s eclectic list of books presented with passion and verve during the discussion portion of the meeting, and read with equal passion and commitment during the delicious silent portion of the meeting.

• England, England by Julian Barnes (audiobook)
• The Only Story by Julian Barnes (audiobook)
• Harry Potter and the Art of Spying by Lynn M. Boughey and Peter Earnest
• My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
• The Long Call by Ann Cleeves (audiobook)
• Patience by Daniel Clowes
• Watching You Without Me by Lynn Coady
• Watermark by Christy Ann Conlin
• The Innocents by Michael Crummey
• Breaking the Ocean – A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Reconciliation by Annahid Dashtgard
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson (audiobook)
• The Rain Watcher by Tatiana de Rosnay (audiobook)
• Children of the Moon by Anthony De Sa
• The 30 Second Commute: A Non Fiction Comedy About Writing and Working From Home by Stephanie Dickison
• Rose’s Run by Dawn Dumont
• The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store by Cait Flanders (audiobook)
• The Witch Elm by Tana French (audiobook)
• Patterns of Empire – The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present by Julian Go
• The Humans by Matt Haig
• The Radleys by Matt Haig
• The Mountain Master of Sha Tin by Ian Hamilton
• The Hole That Must Be Filled by Kenneth J. Harvey
• The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz
• Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
• A Small Person Far Away by Judith Kerr
• An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion by Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow
• The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso
• Our Eyes, Our Tongue by Erika McKeen
• Circe by Madeline Miller
• The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton (audiobook)
• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
• The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray
• The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (audiobook)
• Popshot Quarterly
• In Search of Lost Time Volume 3 – Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
• The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson
• Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney
• Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
• We are the Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Autumn by Ali Smith
• Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout (audiobook)
• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (audiobook)
• The Break by Katherena Vermette
• Robert Capa, A Biography by Richard Whelan
• October by Richard B. Wright

(Photos by Jo Nelson)

Enjoy our previous silent book club meeting reports and book lists 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.

• CBC Radio’s Ontario Morning (starting at 41:20)
• CBC Toronto web site
• a series of interviews across Canada with CBC Radio, including Toronto’s Here and Now
• The Christian Science Monitor – Witty banter optional: The no-pressure, no-homework book club

San Francisco-based Silent Book Club founders Guinevere de La Mare and Laura Gluhanich were most recently featured in a wonderful piece on the NPR web site (yes, National Public Radio, thank you very much!). Extensive and enthusiastic coverage silent book club coverage includes this piece in the February 2019 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine, describing the club’s genesis and extolling its virtues as the concept and clubs spread worldwide.

If you’re interested in starting your own silent book club or are in the Toronto area and perhaps interested in checking ours out, please feel free to contact me for more information.

San Francisco-based Silent Book Club founders Guinevere de La Mare and Laura Gluhanich were most recently featured in a wonderful piece on the NPR web site. Thanks to that fantastic coverage, lots of curious readers are googling “silent book club [city]” … and many more readers in the Greater Toronto Area are finding us. As a result, we arranged to do a doubleheader this month, with meetings on Saturday and Sunday at our favourite spot, Press …

By doubling the number of meetings, at least for this month, we were able to welcome some new attendees, still have room for our ongoing members, and not compromise the quality of our gatherings – or blow out Press’ walls – with too large a group. We might be able to double up our meetings on occasion, but another way we can accommodate the enthusiasm for the silent book club experience is by helping others to start their own groups … and in that regard, we have some great news! A recent attendee at one of our meetings earlier this summer has started a group in the Mississauga area. Another regular attendee of our meetings is guiding a traditional book club of which she is a member to transition to a silent book club, and hers will be meeting in midtown Toronto. These groups are just getting off the ground, but if you’re interested in finding out more, please contact me for more details. Needless to say, we’re thrilled to see our group’s energy and enthusiasm spinning off into new groups benefiting more readers, local businesses and communities.

As always, before the silent reading portion of the meeting, we went around the table so everyone could offer highlights on their recent reading discoveries, delights and challenges. One fellow reader revealed that chancing upon Judith Kerr’s obituary in The Economist has opened some new reading pleasures that she and her children are sharing together. When I described part of the inspiration for Karen Solie’s latest poetry collection, The Caiplie Caves, another fellow reader nearly jumped out of her chair to insist she needed to read those poems, because she’s been to that part of the rugged coast of Scotland. Another fellow reader spoke with brief and moving eloquence about the joys of revisiting Alistair MacLeod’s short stories in Island. These moments and more are why the “non-silent” portion of our meetings seems to be as cherished as the silent portion.

The range and variety of books we highlighted, recommended, occasionally expressed dismay or disappointment about and devoted a concentrated an hour to … once again, the list is lush, delicious, lively, intriguing.

(Note: The list that follows now reflects books discussed in both sessions of our two-meeting weekend.)

• Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
• Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre
• Daring to Drive by Manal al-Sharif
• MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood (audiobook)
• The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
• Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard
• How to be Sick by Toni Bernhard
• The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown
• Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson by Mark Bourrie
• Original Prin by Randy Boyagoda
• My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
• Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon
• Changes that Heal by Henry Cloud
• Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
• The Innocents by Michael Crummey
• Flow – The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
• Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
• Exile Quarterly
• The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis
• The Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) by Elena Ferrante
• In Pieces by Sally Field (audiobook)
• The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (audiobook)
• Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
• Early Riser by Jasper Fforde
• The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
• A Maggot by John Fowles
• Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
• Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon
• The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
• The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey
• Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy
• Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
• The Water Rat of Wanchai by Ian Hamilton
• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
• Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Breaking Free – How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and My Father, Warren Jeffs by Rachel Jeffs
• The Son of a Certain Woman by Wayne Johnston
• The Clue in the Diary (Nancy Drew Mystery Stories) by Carolyn Keene
• When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr
• Bombs on Aunt Dainty by Judith Kerr
• The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
• That Time I Loved You by Carrianne Leung
• I Know my Own Heart: The Diary of Anne Lister
• Island by Alistair MacLeod
• Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
• The Path Between the Seas – The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 by David McCullough
• Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
• February by Lisa Moore
• Alice Munro short story compilation
• The Whisper Man by Alex North
• Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill
• Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page
• The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett (audiobook)
• The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny
• Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny
• The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny
• In Search of Lost Time Volume 3 – Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
• The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
• Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney (audiobook)
• Bina by Anakana Schofield
• Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman
• Leaving the Witness by Amber Scorah
• Discovering Dorothea by Karolyn Shindler
• Autumn by Ali Smith
• Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith (audiobook)
• Aging With Grace by David Snowdon
• The Caiplie Caves by Karen Solie
• Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett
• Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
• Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
• Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method by Daniel Scott Tysdal
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk
• Desert Queen – The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia by Janet Wallach
• Train the Brave: Tame Your Fear, Take the Chance, Dare to Live Big by Margie Warrell
• Worry by Jessica Westhead

Enjoy our previous silent book club meeting reports and book lists 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.

• CBC Radio’s Ontario Morning (starting at 41:20)
• CBC Toronto web site
• a series of interviews across Canada with CBC Radio, including Toronto’s Here and Now
• The Christian Science Monitor – Witty banter optional: The no-pressure, no-homework book club

San Francisco-based Silent Book Club founders Guinevere de La Mare and Laura Gluhanich were most recently featured in a wonderful piece on the NPR web site (yes, National Public Radio, thank you very much!). Extensive and enthusiastic coverage silent book club coverage includes this piece in the February 2019 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine, describing the club’s genesis and extolling its virtues as the concept and clubs spread worldwide.

If you’re interested in starting your own silent book club or are in the Toronto area and perhaps interested in checking ours out, please feel free to contact me for more information.