Sometimes, gathering around a zoom screen can be just like gathering around a warm fire in good company. We managed one last pop-up meeting of our silent book club last night, and that’s exactly how it felt. As always, my tbr list expanded, as did my heart!

We’re all briskly ushering the year that was out the door, aren’t we? What I won’t usher out or sweep under the rug is that we all managed to forge new ways to connect through this year’s challenges. Our silent book club went from in-person meetings in a local book/record/coffee shop and a few gatherings in a nearby park to regular zoom meetings and some physically distanced gatherings in that same park – and it all remained vital and sustaining, if not more so. While in some ways our worlds grew dramatically smaller, books and book friends helped us to continue to explore and travel through it all. Our virtual meetings allowed us to fling open new doors, such that Toronto city limits now encompass Wales – imagine that!

Our past meeting / book reports chronicle not just our reading, but our reading challenges. Those challenges, of course, are just a reflection of the broader challenges we and our communities grappled with throughout the year. At the same time, I’m grateful and imagine many of my fellow booklovers are that our reading, our meetings and our connections were some respite from the frustrations and despair.

Even though we fit this meeting in a mere two weeks after our last one, many of our members got in solid and extensive reading, thanks to extra quiet time, thoughtful gifts and newly minted Jólabókaflóð traditions. So, we have yet another generous combined reading list to share. As always, the titles featured in each of our reports combine print and digital versions of books, along with audiobooks (which are indicated separately).

• Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar (audiobook)
• The Night Piece by Andre Alexis
• Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
• Dearly by Margaret Atwood
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
• The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
• The Darkest Evening by Ann Cleeves
• Up Jumped the Devil – The Real Life of Robert Johnson by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow
• Generation X : Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland
• A Saving Grace by Lorna Crozier
• The Hours by Michael Cunningham
• The Girl with the Louding
  Voice by Abi Daré
• The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
• Lon Chaney Speaks by Pat Dorian
• Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
• Food and Drink Holiday Issue 2020
  
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
• Grilled by Leah Garcés
• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
• The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
• Sarah Binks by Paul Hiebert
• From Oral to Written, A Celebration of Indigenous Literature in Canada, 1980-2010 by Tomson Highway
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, read by Sunil Malhotra and Cassandra Campbell (audiobook)
• Passing by Nella Larsen, read by Robin Miles (audiobook)
• Falling in Love by Donna Leon
• Toronto: Biography of a City by Allan Levine
• Rachel to the Rescue by Elinor Lipman
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• The Gifts of Reading by Robert Macfarlane
• The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
• How to Wash the Dishes by Peter Miller
• The Less Dead by Denise Mina
• Heft by Liz Moore
• A Promised Land by Barack Obama
• How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
• The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
• Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris
• The Nature of the Beast by Louise Penny
• The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult
• The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott
• Away with the Penguins by Hazel Prior
• Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta
• Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case By Mordecai Richler
• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
• As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross
• The Covent Garden Ladies by Hallie Rubenhold
• Christmas Ghost Stories by Seth
• Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, read by Emily Klein (audiobook)
• 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak
• Light on Snow by Anita Shreve
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa
• Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
• All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister
• Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L. Trump
• Square Haunting by Francesca Wade
• Evelyn’s Stories by Pamela Williams
• The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

One of our members revealed that she found some of her recent reading from the NPR Book Concierge and she recommended checking it out.

Our silent book club chapter celebrated its third anniversary this past autumn. Our group co-founder Jo paid lovely tribute.

As always, our previous silent book club meeting reports (online and in-person incarnations) and book lists are here.

You can also 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.

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. Some clubs are currently on haitus, but many are running virtual meetings in different formats. Please feel free to contact me for more information about our club and its offerings.

It’s possible things are going to get darker for a time. We can light our way and our spirits for now with reading and continued connections to our fellow readers. One of my very thoughtful silent book club friends put this in the envelope with her holiday greetings …

… and I’m going to carefully pass it along, like a torch, to another friend in books. Let’s encourage each other to keep those candles and torches and campfires ablaze.