The sun shines, at least figuratively, any day that includes a silent book club meeting. That the sun actually shone this morning as we all prepared for today’s meeting was every reader’s favourite example of pathetic fallacy. Even though the bulk of the meeting was, as it has been for a while, online … the fact that (yes, Ducks, Newburyport was mentioned briefly today!) the sun shone as a few of us in the neighbourhood met for a physically distanced catch-up outside Press, the book / record / coffee shop, our pre-pandemic (and we hope post-pandemic) meeting place.

You can’t see it, but I was grinning from ear to ear as I got ready for that visit.

You also can’t see the smiles of our silent book club friends, but trust they were there as we enjoyed some neighbourly chat and showed off some of the books that are helping us through this challenging time.

While we’ve comisserated about the pandemic’s effects on our ability to concentrate and read, it’s been reassuring to see the tide gently turn over the course of our recent silent book club meetings to how our reading is influencing our thinking about current and future circumstances. One member talked about how he has been pondering his love of travel, how that is going to change post-pandemic and, interestingly, how a recent read has reframed some things for him. He described the children’s book The 79 Squares by Malcolm J. Bosse, in which an unlikely friendship develops between a troubled 14-year-old boy and an 82-year-old man:

“The old man introduces his new friend to the natural beauty and life of the garden in which he now spends most of his time. He instructs Eric to divide the garden into 79 squares, asking that the boy spend one hour a day in each square and watch life unfold — from the ant to the squirrel.” (from 1979 New York Times review)

Our silent book club friend commented on how that premise compelled him to consider the city block around his home, to travel it and examine it with the same attention as he would more far flung places. What revelations our reading provides us with, perhaps when we least expect it.

No matter how enthusiastic (or not) each of us is about technology, we all have misgivings about the amount of screen time pervading our lives. That said, I think all or most of us would agree that technology has helped to keep us in vital communication with each other, for business, community and personal reasons. As “zoomed out” as a lot of us are, we still don’t want to miss our family gatherings, yoga classes and book club discussions and even silent reading sessions.

What I’ve been delighted to discover is how we can “dial down” the technology, but still use it to allow people to stay “dialed in”, even blending in non-digital forms of communication to stitch it all together. For this latest zoom meeting of our book club, we invited participants in by good old landline phone – and I even extended the invitation to one participant with a handwritten note delivered to the mailbox on her front porch:

After leaving her that note a few days ago, it felt like a special kind of magic to hear her voice during today’s zoom meeting.

The fleeting, distanced visits connect us. The zoom meetings connect us. And our eclectic, lovingly assembled book list connects us to each other and to all other readers out there, getting through all of what we’re all getting through right now.

• Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
• The Taken by Inger Ash Wolfe (alias for Michael Redhill)
• Transcription by Kate Atkinson
• Matthew Barney: Redoubt
• Black+White Photography magazine
• Life of Emily Carr by Paula Blanchard
• The 79 Squares by Malcolm J. Bosse
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino (audiobook)
• True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
• Bad Blood – Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
• A Lesser Photographer by CJ Chilvers
• The Untold by Courtney Collins
• The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins
• Research Design by John W. Creswell and J. David Creswell
• Younger Next Year for Women by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
• Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
• My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
• Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (alias for J.K. Rowling)
• Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (alias for J.K. Rowling)
• Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
• Five Little Indians by Michelle Good
• The End of Me by John Gould
• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
• The Wisdom of Groundhog Day – How to improve your life one day at a time by Paul Hannam
• Benediction by Kent Haruf
• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
• Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
• Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez
• Slow Horses by Mick Herron
• A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Always Look On the Bright Side of Life by Eric Idle (audiobook)
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles (audiobook)
• Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It by Gina Kolata
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vision Boards by Marcia Layton Turner
• A Hobbit a Wardrobe and a Great War by Joseph Loconte
• Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas
• Blowout – Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth by Rachel Maddow
• Full Disclosure by Beverley McLachlin
• The Progress of Love by Alice Munro
• Let’s Tell This Story Properly by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
• Purge by Sofi Oksanen
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• Poetry magazine
• Salvage by Duncan Ralston
• The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson
• The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
• The Five: The Untold Stories of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
• Beautiful Boy by David Sheff
• Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff
• Spacing magazine
• Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney
• Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
• Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
• Olive Again by Elizabeth Strout
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson
• Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life by Ali Wong

You can always catch up on our previous silent book club meeting reports (our current online incarnation and our previous, lovingly recalled, much anticipated again in-person version) 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 still going to repeat it with continued 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 recent 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, put the current situation in perhaps new and fresh contexts, and make the time pass swiftly.

As we observed – in Brady Bunch zoom formation – in recent online silent book club meetings, reading just doesn’t feel the same or offer the same solace and escape as it did before the world changed as it did. But by meeting and commiserating and try try trying again, we’re finding the words and the pieces and the books that are getting us back to what we love. And by getting back to what we love, we’re equipping ourselves to cope with whatever version of so-called normal comes next.

During our latest silent book club meeting, scheduled as a surprise “pop-up” outside of our usual schedule that everyone seemed to appreciate, we shared the ways in which we’re working to get back into satisfying reading grooves. One approach that seems to be working is rereading past favourites. Interestingly, it seems to be the comfort of the familiar, although not necessarily comfort reads per se that is clicking. For example, a couple of us coincidentally are rereading the short story collection The Progress of Love by Canada’s Nobel Prize-winning Alice Munro – and oh, what we’re discovering/rediscovering! Ms Munro is a truly wicked and incisive observer of human nature, and of the passions and frustrations that swim not far beneath the benign and mundane surfaces of the everyday. And oh, how bracing and energizing it is to return 20 (er, or more) years later to reread what captivated the first time with age and gained experience and, of course, wisdom.

Silent book club members have always touted the magic of certain magazines – particularly for long form pieces and journalism – for keeping up one’s reading momentum and enthusiasm. The New Yorker and The Economist are favourites, and others have mentioned and shared copies of West End Phoenix, Arc Poetry, The Walrus and Popshot Quarterly, among others.

Here’s a little bit of what and where our silent book club members are reading right now:

While we all remain a little concerned individually that our reading enthusiasm and tempo is not quite what it was (but hey, it’s never been a competition), our aggregate book list is still rich, formidable and gorgeous. Here is the latest:

• Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I by Peter Ackroyd
• The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• Books by Inger Ash Wolfe (alias for Michael Redhill) (audiobooks)
• Bad Blood – Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• The books of Agatha Christie
• American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
• Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• The Economist
• Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
• The Girl Who Reads on the Métro by Christine Feret-Fleury (audiobook)
• The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
• Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith
• To the River: Losing My Brother by Don Gillmor
• Benediction by Kent Haruf (audiobook)
• Small Change by Elizabeth Hay
• The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart
• Always Look On the Bright Side of Life by Eric Idle (audiobook)
• A Noble Radiance by Donna Leon
• Dumpty by John Lithgow
• Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• I Am Woman by Lee Maracle
• The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
• The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
• The Progress of Love by Alice Munro
• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
• The New Yorker
• Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret by Ben Taub (in The New Yorker)
• The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht (audiobook)
• The books of Louise Penny
• Sodom and Gomorrah, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 4 by Marcel Proust
• His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
• Ghostland by Duncan Ralston
• Salvage by Duncan Ralston
• Every Part of the Animal by Duncan Ralston
• Stiff by Mary Roach (audiobook)
• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (audiobook)
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith
• The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J Ryan Stradal
• On the Plain of Snakes by Paul Theroux
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• The Witch of the Inner Wood by M. Travis Lane
• The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
• 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam

As always, you can catch up on our previous silent book club meeting reports (from our current online incarnation and our previous and lovingly recalled and anticipated again in-person version) 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 continued 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 recent 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.