A neighbour walks into a favourite local coffee shop (East Toronto Coffee Co!), spots our group ensconced in a cozy corner, silently reading and enjoying our beverages, pastries and the company of fellow readers, and addresses us:

“Hey, are you the book club from TV?”

and we reply, “Why yes, we are!”

and he declares, smiling:

“You’re famous!”

Why yes, I guess we are!

… and not only are we famous, but we’re effing brilliant!

… and not only are we all that, but our group’s continuous celebration takes many forms, including sharing moving passages from our reading:

“The desk is empty except for a pewter mug – a polo trophy won by her grandfather – holding pens, and a small Persian box with a design in dull blue and gold. It had been her mother’s, and had held paper clips. The box gives Sarah a sweet tiny rush of feeling. It still holds her mother’s paper clips, she has never emptied it. She feels a near magical connection to the box, and to the paper clips inside, which her mother had touched. She can’t explain why – her mother had touched many things in the house – but the little box is charged. It was part of her mother’s daily life, and is still here, whole. She knows this feeling is only hers. Her children may know that the box was her mother’s, that the paper clips were hers, but it can’t matter to them as it does to Sarah. She never uses the paper clips. She wants to keep the link intact, as though the presence of the paper clips themselves, light and silvery and insubstantial, means that her mother might use them still.”

excerpt from Leaving by Roxana Robinson

Our discussion meeting this month took a different tack. Rather than a topic related to reading and readers, group members Tom and Lisa led a discussion on a specific book: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As they described it, “SBC is founded on the subtle quality of silence. Addressing Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, [we] will be hosting a chat about silence as a powerful trope, and the importance and implications of confronting difficult issues out loud.” So yes, we were kind of gathering like a more traditional book club. It was an interesting change of pace, beautifully facilitated and instructive even if you had not yet finished the book or, in some cases, had blurred recollection of it because, say, one had read it during the early days of the pandemic.

Oh my heavens, what another dizzyingly gorgeous and varied reading list we have to share again this month! Every title on our group’s lists means that at least one (but usually more) readers have given that title thoughtful consideration. That doesn’t mean that every work on our lists is expressly recommended – but that’s more than OK, we think. Inclusion on this list always means that our readers have devoted time and attention to a title – and that, dear readers, means a lot.

• Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, translated by Julia Sanches
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, narrated by Adjoah Andoh (audiobook)
• Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse, edited by Kaveh Akbar
• Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
• Lovely War by Julie Berry, narrated by Jayne Entwistle, Allan Corduner, Julie Berry, Dion Graham, Fiona Hardingham, John Lee, Nathaniel Parker, Steve West (audiobook)
• Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
• Indigenous Toronto: stories that carry this place, edited by Denise Bolduc & Mnawaate Gordon-Corbiere, Rebeka Tabobondung, Brian Wright-McLeod
• Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum, translated by Shanna Tan
• The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
• Look After Her by Hannah Brown
• Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York by Roz Chast
• The Quiet Damage by Jesselyn Cook
• Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
• Clearing the Plains – Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Indigenous Life by James Daschuk
• Shakespeare: the man who pays the rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea, narrated by Barbara Flyn and the authors (audiobook)
• Independence by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, narrated by Sneth Mathan (audiobook)
• Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott
• As You Wish: inconceivable tales from the making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes and Joe Layden, narrated by author and members of cast (audiobook)
• Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright
• Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista
• James by Percival Everett, narrated by Dominic Hoffman (audiobook)
• Mystery in the Title by Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson
• Natural Order by Brian Francis
• The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths
• The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths
• Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah, narrated by Damian Lynch (audiobook)
• Cook Korean!: A Comic Book with Recipes by Robin Ha
• Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity by Byung-Chul Han
• The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris
• The Warehouse by Rob Hart
• The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey
• Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, translated by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff
• Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins
• Skyward, Volume 1: My Low-G Life by Joe Henderson
• The Story of Us by Catherine Hernandez (audiobook)
• Search: a memoir with recipes by Dana Louise Potowski: a novel by Michelle Huneven, narrated by Cassandra Campbell (audiobook)
• Good Talk: a memoir in conversations by Mira Jacob
• Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson
• An Island by Karen Jennings, narrated by Ben Onwukwe (audiobook)
• […] by Fady Joudah
• Babel by R.F. Kuang
• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
• The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson, narrated by Erik Larson, John Lee (audiobook)
• Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo
• The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel, narrated by Sarah Scott (audiobook)
• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, narrated by John Lee/Dylan Moore/Kirsten Potter/Arthur Morey (audiobook)
• No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (audiobook)
• The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
• Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
• The Eight by Katherine Neville
• Chinese Poems for Students of Chinese Volume 1 by Robert New
• Are You Willing to Die for the Cause by Chris Oliveros
• Mona by Pola Oloixarac
• Last Night at the Lobster: a novel by Stewart O’Nan, narrated by Jonathan Davis (audiobook)
• The Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
• The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake by Breece D’J Pancake
• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
• The Floating Girls by Lo Patrick, narrated by Taylor Meskimen (audiobook)
• The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters, narrated by Aaliya Warbus, Jordan Waunch (audiobook)
• Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips, narrated by Karissa Vacker/Theo Stockman/Maggi-Meg Reed (audiobook)
• How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley
• The Caretaker by Ron Rash
• The Caretaker by Ron Rash, narrated by James Patrick Cronin (audiobook)
• The Risen by Ron Rash
• Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta, narrated by Ordena Stephens-Thompson (audiobook)
• Leaving by Roxana Robinson
• Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny by Nile Rodgers
• Something to Live For (aka How Not to Die Alone) by Richard Roper, narrated by Simon Vance (audiobook)
• Wordhunter by Stella Sands
• The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer
• Dark Diversions by John Ralston Saul
• Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
• The Sealey Challenge (with the tweets from this silent book club member’s 31 days of poetry reading)
• Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder by William Shatner
• The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo
• Maus: a survivor’s tale by Art Spiegelman
• Everyone on This Train is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson
• Holiness Here by Karen Stiller
• A Talent for Murder by Peter Swanson
• Long Island< by Colm Toibin
• Long Island by Colm Toibin, narrated by Jessie Buckley (audiobook)
• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• Table for Two by Amor Towles
• Fire Weather by John Vaillant
• I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together: a memoir by Maurice Vellekoop
• The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
• One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware
• The Maid’s Diary by Loreth Anne White
• The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead
• Night by Elie Wiesel (audiobook)
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, narrated by Jennifer Kim, Julian Cihi (audiobook)
• Therese Raquin by Emile Zola, narrated by Juliet Stevenson (audiobook)

Wait, there’s more! How about 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.

• Have you had a look at the 2024 Booker Prize longlist? The shortlist will be announced September 16, 2024 and the winner will be announced November 12, 2024.
• Enjoy the gorgeous smiles and bookish camaraderie at the Fertil3 poetry fest at The Printed Word Bookshop in Dundas, Ontario on August 25, 2024.
• Need some poetry podcasts? Try Poem-a-Day and The Slowdown.
• Need some poetry events, including livestreams? Try Fady Joudah at the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize Reading and Ada Limon at the New York Public Library.

Immerse yourself in our group’s previous reports and book lists right here!

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 the worldwide phenomenon of silent book clubs via Guinevere and Laura’s Silent Book Club web site. In fall 2023, they welcomed their 500th chapter … and with continuing and astonishing momentum, they are now boasting over 1,000 chapters!!! (There were around 60 chapters when we joined as the first Toronto chapter in 2017.) 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.

And yes, if you see us silently reading “in the wild” … we are the book club from TV! 🙂

Our silent book club readers are a witty and articulate bunch, it probably won’t surprise you to learn. Sometimes as the conversation flows jauntily around one absorbing reading updates after another, the synopses of different books enchants as much as the books themselves. When, for example, one of our readers described a book as being a “twisted spiritual quest”, not only was I captivated, but it sent me off on a wee tangent (not for long, because I didn’t want to miss the next update) on how we’re often on different literary quests with our reading – and hence the title of our latest report. Nuff said!

Our discussion meeting this month revisited a previous topic that was shot through with new and troubling urgency. Can we/should we separate the person from the work? We’ve discussed variations on this subject before, but the shocking Alice Munro news has all of us very sadly contemplating this again.

Much has been written, was published as recently as a couple of days ago, and will still be written on this. We took as our cue this piece by American writer Brandon Taylor. We vented, we grieved, we expressed a range of emotions, we admitted that we didn’t know how to express our feelings, we acknowledged that privilege plays a part in what we should and should not be focusing on …

After the meeting, I was inspired to send this message to the group:

“Thank you” was not nearly sufficient, but I want to thank all of you for taking part in last night’s silent book club discussion pop-up. One of the many joys of assembling with you, virtually and in-person, is that it is literally a joy, a celebration, so uplifting. That we can also gather to take on the thornier aspects of being dedicated readers is, well, maybe not something we want to make a habit of … but when we do, I am so grateful to do that with such thoughtful, insightful, articulate and generous individuals.

Every title on our group’s lists means that at least one (but usually more) readers have given that title thoughtful consideration. To be honest, that doesn’t mean that every work on our lists is expressly recommended. However, inclusion on this list always means that our readers have devoted time and attention to a title – and that, dear readers, means a lot.

• Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie
• Bunny by Mona Awad
• Concrete Island by JG Ballard
• Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum, translated by Shanna Tan
• Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt
• The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
• The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
• Car: A Novel by Harry Crews
• An Anthology of Monsters – How Story Saves Us From Our Anxiety by Cherie Dimaline
• The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova
• Killdeer by Phil Hall
• Feebleminded by Ariana Harwicz, translated by Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff
• None of this is true by Lisa Jewell
• The Ghost Map – The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
• Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (audiobook)
• Have You Eaten Yet? Stories from Chinese Restaurants Around the World by Cheuk Kwan
• The Devil in the White City – Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
• In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (audiobook)
• The Other Fab Four – A Memoir by Mary McGlory & Sylvia Saunders
• Unruly by David Mitchell
• The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
• Off the Tracks – A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel by Pamela Mulloy
• The Coast Road by Alan Murrin
• You Are Here by David Nicholls
• Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
• How to Do Nothing – Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
• Essays by George Orwell
• Lilith by Eric Rickstead
• The Guncle Abroad by Steven Rowley
• How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
• My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand
• Her First Palestinian by Saeed Teebi
• Table for Two by Amor Towles
• Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
• The Killer in King’s Cove by Iona Whishaw
• Lightning Strikes the Silence by Iona Whishaw
• Policing Ireland’s Twisted History by Alan W. Wilson
• The Orphans of Mersea House by Marty Wingate
• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
• Braised Pork: A Novel by An Yu

Need 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.

• The New York Public Library (NYPL) celebrates James Baldwin.
• The New York Public Library (NYPL) recommends 25 Books To Get You Excited for the Summer Olympics.
• Need some inspiration and ideas to take on The Sealey Challenge poetry challenge in August? Try some poetry podcasts, including The Poetry Exchange and Poetry Unbound | The On Being Project.

Immerse yourself in our group’s previous reports and book lists right here!

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 the worldwide phenomenon of silent book clubs via Guinevere and Laura’s Silent Book Club web site. In fall 2023, they welcomed their 500th chapter … and with breathtaking momentum, they are now boasting over 1,000 chapters!!! (There were around 60 chapters when we joined as the first Toronto chapter in 2017.) 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.

Hoping you succeed in all of your literary quests!

I’m guessing our sense of place – both collective and individual – has changed significantly in very recent years. Where we are when we are here, when we are meeting, when we are with someone and so on has sharp new meanings when coupled with how we resorted to social media platforms or different renditions of virtual connection to stay in contact (one definition of contact, anyhow) when we were not able to be in physical proximity or contact. I won’t fill this blog post with too many meandering thoughts about what we might still be going through with respect to connecting or not connecting and what that means, because I do want to get to the latest brimming and delicious book list our group has amassed. But here are some questions and thoughts that popped up for me as I was prepping this month’s silent book club report:

• When we meet virtually with fellow readers, even if most of those gathering are within walking distance of each other, is someone zooming with us from across a border or an ocean here with us? (The edges of east end Toronto extend here and here, so my answer is a hearty “yes!”)
• When we meet in person on a patio, in a park or in a coffee shop with fellow readers from the neighbourhood, is the here that location or is the here the places we inhabit in our books once we’re reading silently together?
• When we are reading by ourselves in our living room or on our balcony or porch or cottage dock, are we there with our other fellow readers, too … while we’re here wherever our books have taken us, as well as here in a comfy reading spot?

In some ways, maybe it’s neither here nor there, eh? We’re blessed to be able to read, we’re fortunate to have access to many ways to read, we’re privileged (in all good senses of that word that remain) to read what we want to read when we want to read it – and to lend our voices on behalf of those being deprived of that right.

Here (see what I did there?) are some of the places our readers and their books were this past month:

Silent book club member Philippa visited the Grolier Poetry Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts
(Here’s an interesting piece from The Paris Review in 2013 on this destination literary landmark.)

Sometimes other activities – like piloting an inflatable loon on a northern Ontario lake – distract one from proper cottaging activities like reading. But then again, with a beverage holder and some way to protect one’s books or reading devices from the water, an inflatable loon on a northern Ontario lake would be as dreamy a reading place as a hammock … just sayin’ …

Here (yes, here) is our group’s latest combined book list, gathering up books mentioned and discussed at our end of July meeting. Each list reflects the reading of many of our members. Many 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 often 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. (This is rare, but a reader confided this month that one of the titles on this list offered one of their worst reading experiences ever …) That said, that same title might be one of your best reading experiences – who knows? Inclusion on this list always means that a title has been given thoughtful consideration and attention by our readers, which counts for a lot.

• Castaways in Time by Robert Adams
• Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
• Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses Eye by Gary Barwin & Lillian Necakov
• Exit by Belinda Bauer
• The House is on Fire by Rachel Beanland
• Silent Women: Pioneers of Cinema, edited by Melody Bridges and Cheryl Robson
• The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne
• Strong Female Character by Fern Brady
• Careering by Daisy Buchanan
• Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
• Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey
• Burial of Ghosts by Ann Cleeves
• Rescued: Book 1 – Darkest of Portland Series by Dena Crawford-Nibler
• Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter
• The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen
• An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
• Fruit by Brian Francis (audiobook)
• Making Psyence Fiction by James Gaunt
• Wild Honey – Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry by Paula Green
• The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths
• Design for Transformative Learning by Lisa Grocott
• Fourth Under Sol by Guerric Haché
• Broken Light by Joanne Harris
• Anatomy of a Killer by Romy Hausmann
• Lucy Maud Montgomery – The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio
• The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Henry Callahan
• Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez
• Shivitti: A Vision by Ka-tzetnik 135633
• The Half Moon by Mary Beth Keane
• The Dutch Wife by Ellen Keith, narrated by Abby Craden, Eric Jason Martin & Charles Thurston (audiobook)
• Other Routes: 1500 years of African and Asian Travel Writing, edited by Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Justin D Edwards and Hanna Ziadeh
• Fairy Tale by Stephen King
• All That Is Mine I Carry With Me by William Landay
• In Amber’s Wake by Christine Leunens
• Sand Castle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters
• The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• 1979 by Val McDermid
• The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan, narrated by Aoife McMahon (audiobook)
• The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, narrated by Cassandra Campbell (audiobook)
• The Man Who Died Twice by by Richard Osman, narrated by Lesley Manville (audiobook)
• Run Towards the Danger by Sarah Polley
• The Revenant by Michael Punke
• Quarterly Essay
• Oh Canada Our Home and Inventive Land! by Prof. Mark Rector
• The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
• Boat by Lisa Robertson
• The Guncle by Steven Rowley (audiobook)
• Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
• The School of Mirrors by Eva Stachniak
• A Death at the Party: A Novel by Amy Stuart
• Animal by Lisa Taddeo
• Suspect by Scott Turow
• One Native Life by Richard Wagamese
• Zero Days by Ruth Ware
• Winter in the Air & Other Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner
• To Track a Traitor by Iona Whisham
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
• Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams
• Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Some other silent book club and reading items of interest …

• Here’s what looks like a wonderful there for silent book club members in New Zealand to meet!
• A reader in Seattle has the broader silent book club network abuzz, thanks to her excited discovery and effusive praise of the silent (maybe not so silent?) book club experience.

  Silent Book Club “head office” offers an email listserv for those who organize and manage sbc chapters around the world, and that community is talking up a storm about the wave of interest and influx of new member requests that @hellomandyo’s video has generated. (Yes, we’ve welcomed lots of new inquiries, too – and look forward to meeting some new readers in the months ahead!) Some chapters run significantly higher capacity events than others (more on that another day), and some chapters are still virtual versus in-person, so how one engages with each group is different. I imagine the delight in reading, reading together and sharing reading delights with other readers, as captured by @hellomandyo, is consistent across all chapters around the world!

Our previous reports and book lists are always available to interest and amaze, not to mention threatening to send your tbr pile toppling! The reports and lists are always 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.

Here, there and everywhere, we hope your reading nurtures head and heart!

“Lots of time … and I don’t know what I’m doing with it.” That’s how one ruefully bemused silent book club member described what would have been a booklover’s delicious dream not so long ago – hours and days and weeks of unstructured, uncommitted, unscheduled time to just read, read, read …

While we’re all still struggling with the distractions of this strange time, us readers are still meeting, comparing notes, working up the energy to enthuse about the reading delights and victories , getting through it together. When we each click “Leave Meeting” to start our shared hour of reading in spirit, I’m certain we’re all coming away feeling bolstered by the company and encouragement. We need to keep doing this, don’t we?

As I did in our last report, I want to share another appreciation on the value of our group from one of our members. Emilia’s is like a love letter, and while poignant, it sounds beautifully hopeful notes for how we are getting through, and what we will look forward to resuming once this is got through:

Dear lovely SBC people,

I live in books. For me, books have always been an escape, a home, a friend, a salvation, a teacher, a window, a mirror, a hope, and a promise. I taught myself to read when I was 4. I’ve been reading ever since. I cannot stress how truly life-saving this has been.

Another life-saving thing has been to – quite late in life, I feel – begin to consciously and deliberately seek out fellow readers and connect with them. You know how they say you should “step out of your comfort zone” now and then? Well, I had spent most of my life outside of mine. Joining the SBC was a much-needed step back *into* that comfort zone.

And, let me tell you, it felt like stepping into a hot bath after a long hard day. Our meetings are the highlight of my month. Invariably, I look forward to sitting with you in companionable silence, to listening to your bookish adventures and suggestions, and wishing, much like Harry had when he first saw the magic of Diagon Alley, that I “had about eight more eyes”, so that I could read all your fascinating recommendations.

PS. I was a book club virgin before the SBC. Since joining, I’ve also tried a regular book club and, somehow, found it much less satisfactory. All I could think was, “Well, that sure was different. Everyone reading and discussing the same book? Weird!”

While we all remain a little concerned individually that our reading enthusiasm and tempo is suffering these days, collectively we still offer a very heartening cornucopia of books. Here is the latest:

• The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Books by Inger Ash Wolfe (alias for Michael Redhill) (audiobooks)
• Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
• A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (audiobook)
• Nylon Road by Parsua Bashi
• Queen Solomon by Tamara Faith Berger
• Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson
• My Ántonia by Willa Cather
• Hamilton Illustrated by David Collier
• Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith
• American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
• Unlock by Bei Dao, translated by Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man-Cheong
• Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter
• Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change by Jared Diamond
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
• Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
• Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
• A Bintel Brief – Love and Longing in Old New York by Liana Finck
• Pilgrim by Timothy Findley
• The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
• Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox & The Creation of a Myth by Katherine Frank
• The Cottingley Secret by Hazel Gaynor
• Still Alice by Lisa Genova
• Coming Ashore by Catherine Gildiner
• Good Housekeeping South Africa (Jan/Feb 2018)
• Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (audiobook)
• The Wisdom of Groundhog Day – How to improve your life one day at a time by Paul Hannam
• The Driftwood Girls by Mark Douglas Home (audiobook)
• Nancy Drew 49: the Secret of Mirror Bay by Carolyn Keene
• A Matter of Malice by Thomas King
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• A Noble Radiance by Donna Leon
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
• The Joy of Movement by Kelly McGonigal
• American Rust by Philipp Meyer
• The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
• The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
• The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht (audiobook)
• Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O’Neill (audiobook)
• The books of Louise Penny
• A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier by Diana and Michael Preston
• Sodom and Gomorrah, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 4 by Marcel Proust
• The Huntress by Kate Quinn
• Salvage by Duncan Ralston
• Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney (audiobook)
• London by Edward Rutherfurd
• Spring by Ali Smith
• Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
• Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale
• On the Plain of Snakes by Paul Theroux
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles + audiobook
• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
• Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson
• Sergeant Frank Hardy mysteries by Wendy Wilson

You can always 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. 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.

Under the current circumstances, this text I put at the end of each silent book club report isn’t entirely applicable, but I’m going to repeat it with optimism anyhow:

If you’ve so far enjoyed the silent book club experience virtually, are you tempted 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.

And the sign-off from our last couple of reports is, I think, still very applicable:

We will wait until we can again fling open our doors, venture out and gather in our communities. 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, be well and let books buoy your spirits and make the time pass swiftly.