Of the many clubs and organizations with which I'm over-involved, the one closest to my heart would have to be my book club. I love book club so much, I really want to capitalize it...Book Club...but that's probably going overboard. I don't even remember for sure when we formed our book club, but I think it must have been 2007. I do remember our very first book. It was Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck, which was a perfect choice for our age group as well as, quite frankly, the state of most of our necks. It was also my "real" introduction to Nora Ephron. "Oh," I exclaimed. "That's who Nora Ephron is!" I had loved her movies, watching them over and over. I had read her pieces in the New Yorker, envied that she lived in the Apthorp, and thought she was wonderfully dead on in all her writing. People like me need a Nora Ephron so we can be reassured it really will be OK and we really are all right. I miss her.
We all seem to like historical fiction and that's where we've been most of this year. Alice generally takes us to the Cape Cod area while Claudia likes to place us in her beloved South Carolina. There isn't a plethora of books set in Kansas, so I have to venture farther afield with my choices.
Our 2012 book list looks like this:
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (Good Lord, this is tedious. Just watch the movie.)
Folly Beach by Dorthea Benton Frank (Charleston, South Carolina. The Gershwins play a role.)
The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzsch (Medieval Germany with all it's nastiness)
The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell (The '50s entertwined with today)
The Soldier's Wife by Margaret LeRoy (WWII...Germans occupy the island of Guernsey)
The Hotel at the Corner of Bitter & Sweet by Jamie Ford (WWII...Seattle & the Japanese internment)
The House at Tyneford by Natasha Solomons (WWII...Southern England Manor House...One Jewish Refugee)
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (WWII...Pacific War, B 24's, Japanese Prison Camps)
Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly
The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman
Our club began with Alice, who invited Pam and Carroll, who invited Judy, who invited Scottie. I was Alice's co-founder, and I invited Kathy, who invited Jan, who invited Claudia, who invited Mariane, who invited Lillian. We've grown slowly and carefully, holding fast to the special comfort that is "us". We care for each other in a way only book clubs can create. We can share a secret, lay out a feeling or whisper a prejudice without fear of recrimination, but a firm expectation of acceptance. We are who we are here. We come from different backgrounds and different cultures. We see things differently and we grow with the sharing. We rejoice together when it's good and we hurt together when it's not. We hate that Scottie is now in Assisted Care and we rejoice that Pam, confined to a high-tech wheelchair, is spending this week in San Francisco. We'll be traveling vicariously when Jan and Kathy sail the Rhine, Mein and Danube next month, and can't wait to hear Judy's stories of Viet Nam when she completes her dream tour. We've grown to be family when, for most of us, actual family is very far away. We're sharing our '60s and '70s, and just beginning to touch the '80s mark. I'm all for pushing on..we have strong, good-looking women showing us the way.
So, perhaps capitalizing BOOK CLUB isn't really over the top, after all.
Oh...did I mention we serve wine? And it's in the afternoon! Tee Hee...
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