I saluted the little green somethings sprouting in our front garden and turned my face gratefully to the warm sunshine as I made my way to our neighbourhood silent book club meeting at bookstore / coffee shop / record store Press this morning. As I`ve chronicled over the last few months, silent book club has seen us through the winter and is now ushering us into spring.

As I observed in last month’s installment, our silent book club has evolved in some wonderful ways, balancing that quiet, concentrated time to focus on our reading with some truly stimulating book discussion. While the core of the silent book club concept is an hour of reading in companionable silence, I think it’s fair to say that our meetings are now a minimum of two hours long now. The lead-in discussion is as interesting as the reading hour is meditative and satisfying, and I personally look forward to both … both bookends (ha ha) to a great book experience.

To summarize from my last installment, I’ll mention again what else has blossomed from our gatherings:

• Recaps of previous reads – Not only do we bring the circle up to date on what we were reading at the previous meeting and how it turned out – good, bad or indifferent – but we now mention other things we’ve read in the mean time.

• Praise and challenges – The group has developed a level of familiarity with each other as readers that not only are we sharing our reading triumphs and enthusiasms, but we’re now feeling sufficiently comfortable to share our challenges, disappointments and criticisms, too. It’s encouraging to be able to discuss where we’re hitting stumbling blocks in our reading, such as encountering interesting subject matter that is couched in problematic fashion, or being disappointed with a particular book by an author who previously delighted us. Getting advice from empathetic fellow readers on how to soldier on or know when to spell one book with another and other approaches is very gratifying.

• Sharing and acquiring books – Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese and Stranger by David Bergen have travelled around the group, and other books have been purchased or picked up at the library on the basis of praise from this group. Did I mention that the setting for our meetings is a cafe set inside a vinyl record and bookshop? Club members need only stroll mere feet from our table to act on recommendations from the group – it happened again today!

Here are the books the members our silent book club meeting read and/or discussed today.

• The Power by Naomi Alderman
• Antigone Undone by Will Aitken
• The Age of Hope by David Bergen
• Stranger by David Bergen
• Brother by David Chariandy
• Transit by Rachel Cusk
• The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
• French Exit by Patrick deWitt
• This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
• The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
• The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
• The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel
• The Kinsey Millhone Alphabet Series by Sue Grafton
• The 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist
• The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• Strange Shores by Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Victoria Cribb
• Washington Square by Henry James (audiobook)
• Different Seasons by Stephen King
• Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
• Animal Farm by George Orwell (audiobook)
• Magenta Soul Whip by Lisa Robertson
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• The House of Hawthorne by Erika Robuck
• The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
• A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land by Adam Shoalts
• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
• Him Standing by Richard Wagamese
• Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

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