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.
Again, like the blog post title says … Even though winter seems to have arrived early and fiercely hereabouts, that did not stop a healthy contingent of dedicated silent book clubbers from coming out on Saturday. Between Press’ delicious hot beverages and pastries, and the waves of enthusiasm as we went round the table, I’m convinced that all booklovers in attendance were thoroughly warmed up before the meeting adjourned.
