Caryl decrees: Summer reading? Forget Oprah!

I am a big reader but not much of a joiner so I had never belonged to a book club until last year. I appreciate how book clubs--mostly women's-- have helped resuscitate the publishing industry and how Oprah's stamp of selection can turn a sleepy title into a best seller overnight. To my thinking, though, Oprah usually chooses books with the same narrative arc: pain, recovery, redemption. I prefer to pick my own reading material, and I have lots of friends and evening commitments so I did not see the point of adding another one with the purpose of discussing a book not of my choosing. Then my friend Carla told me that she had read in the New York Times that ritualized social interaction is a critical contributor to happiness in our second lives.

Carla's book shelf of Tribeca Book Club selections

The book club I joined last fall was really my repurposed mother’s group from 20 years ago. Most of the women who belonged to the club had  lived in Tribeca and our children had attended the same neighborhood pre-school in the early 90s. With daily drop offs, birthday parties and fundraisers, we got to know each other mostly through our offspring. Now that the kids were in college, or beyond, the mothers who started the book club were looking for a connection of a different kind: more intellectual, more social, more woman-centric than mother-based. In short, they were looking for a stimulating evening together as grown-ups.

Tribeca Book Club favorites: fiction (2), non-fiction (1)

Since the club began a couple of years ago, the group has read 41 books. If you are looking for some summer reading already road-tested by women like you, consider these. Among the fictional favorites: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and The Eloquence of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. The non-fiction winner hands-down was The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. 

Satirical Sci-Fi vs Routine  Erotic: Can you guess what we picked?

The most disputed selection was A Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, which was substituted half-heartedly when the club rejected Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. Most of my fellow club members didn't like this 21st century Love Story by Shteyngart but I  actually enjoyed the futuristic satire quite a bit.  I would never have picked up his book on my own but found it engaging nonetheless. One of the many benefits of a book club is that it takes you beyond your usual tastes. (Maybe we should have  tried Fifty Shades but would you really want to discuss it en masse?)

We range in age from mid-fifties to mid-sixties with 19 children--10 boys, 9 girls) among us and a scattering of grandchildren. We are married (6), divorced (1) and separated (1), and a couple of members, who joined after the core group came together, are single (2).  The current members include a lawyer, an investment banker, a  nursery school teacher, a nurse-turned-social marketer, an insurance executive, and the co-founder with her spouse of a company that sells beautiful household products that you probably use. The latter stayed home for a decade with her children but the other women except for brief breaks worked outside home.

Others of us have had direct contact with books in our professional lives. One was head of a publishing company that acquired among other titles the Harry Potter books (by the way, J.R.Rowling's first adult fiction The Casual Vacancy will be published in September), Babysitters Club and the early works by Suzanne Collins before she wrote Hunger Games.  Another member, a graphic artist who also does wood cuts, designed book covers including the cover of my daughter’s collection of poetry, and still another, an advertising vice president won the industry’s top awards for an ad campaign for 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher, a book about bullying. Of course, as a former magazine editor, I've published my share of writers and, now in my second life, I interview authors, such as Joan Didion, for Publishers Weekly. I’m about to interview Tom Wolfe about his upcoming book Back to Blood, the story of Cuba immigration in Miami. I like to think of my beat as literary legends.

Chocolate pie

Apple  pie

The format of the book club is simple: the person who picks the book hosts the evening and leads the discussion the first Tuesday of the month. (We take July and August off.) Regardless of what you may have heard about other clubs that exist mostly to drink wine and seldom to discuss the book, we do both—with enthusiasm. Following our spirited literary conversation, we move to the dining room table where the conversation is more free-ranging, from Mad Men (Do you still think Joan is a feminist after last season?) to The Mickey Mouse Club (Who but your peer group knows the words to the songs?) to national politics (How can we get more women in office?) Sometimes the dinner menu takes inspiration from the book. Once when we had read The Help by Kathryn Stockett --you guessed it if you read it--we had chocolate pie for dessert. And, apple pie was the final course the night we talked about the Steve Jobs' biography. That evening several members showed up in jeans and black turtle-necks in  homage to the recently deceased subject of the book. There were I-Pads too as there always are but as a rule most of us prefer to read the physical books.

Art imitates life or life imitates art

The book club reaches beyond discussing books. When the club was reading The Submission by Amy Waldman, a novel about a Muslim-architect who wins a design competition to build the memorial to 9/11 victims, the subject had special resonance.  The night the club met to discuss Submission, instead they walked to the recently-opened World Trade Center memorial,  Together they circled the pools that mark the former footprints of the buildings. Most of us had lived or still live within a few blocks of the site of the attack, and several of us--including me- could not return to our homes for a couple of weeks afterwards. All of us were traumatized, and none of us look at the new lower Manhattan skyline without remembering a more innocent time.

Another tragedy struck much closer to home. A woman who belonged to the club--a mother of two sons--was killed in a tragic car accident. (The driver of the other car was drunk.) At her service, the book club members, uniform in their little black dresses and their grief, stood together as their eulogies were read.  They recalled their friend and club member:  Her warmth, her smile, her striking profile, her verve, her effervescent energy, her quiet eloquence, her thoughtfulness, her generous spirit. "I think you can learn a lot about a person just by listening to them speak about books," said one member. "This is how I learned about Helene. She was a woman with a keen intellect, a wonderful sense of humor, an enthusiasm for life. . and a love for the printed word that was infectious."

I have said more than once that I read books to excavate the truth from our lives, to teach me how to exist in a world that confounds. But I have learned from my book club that those truths when shared with others, and considered and maybe reconsidered, make the examined (second) life well-worth living.  And, yes,  ritualized socialized interaction does indeed make for greater happiness.  

Edith: Where art thou?

Won't you join the club? Tell me if you have read any of the books on the list and what you liked about them. Or, if you want the complete Tribeca Book Club's reading list, just ask. It includes our September selection: The Innocents by Francesca Segal, a modern day retelling of Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence.