Monthly Archives: December 2019

Enjoying a mini holiday away from the holidays with a bonus silent book club gathering

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

All is calm, all is bright, all (well, some …) is silent at our beloved book club

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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.

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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.

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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 …

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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.

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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.

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.