Category: Book Group

Wednesday my book group is meeting here so I have to get a dessert ready. We’re reading The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant. It’s a “modern midrash” on the rape of Dinah story. For preparation, we read the Jacob cycle in the Bible to get a handle on all the women and all the events surrounding the rape. I didn’t push this topic. For some reason the group has gotten interested in reading the Bible and then going on to a modern commentary. Last year we did the Abraham and Sarah cycle and then read a dramatic poem by Pamela White Hadas (from her book In Light of Genesis) called “The Departures and Voices of Sarah” of which the first lines are: “I knew before I married him/he wasn’t such a good catch, as my mother said.”

I learned today that one our of Wednesday Book Group women has bone cancer. [She] is a favorite of mine and I’m very distressed for her.

Our book group is beginning to struggle. One had a stroke a few months back, but is okay enough to attend. But she has severe eye problems so we can only read books that she can get as a recorded book. Fortunately she can get almost everything from the Library of Congress, for free. Another is moving to Detroit. Another is in the early-middle stage of Alzheimers, but still attends because another woman loyally brings her.

I updated the list of books that we’ve read since 1969. (I didn’t join the group until 1980.) Thirty years for such a weekly reading group is a phenomenal record, I think. The actual number of books comes to just over 200, about 6-7 books per year. But it’s the quality and variety, not the quantity, that is impressive. We read only books that you wouldn’t read by yourself and sometimes can spend 2-3 months on one book.

The book group is about one third of the way through Swann’s Way (Vol. 1 of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance) and we all think it is an absolutely amazing book. It is one of those books you should at least taste before you die. Like getting to see the Grand Canyon and Petra.

My book group is finally reading something very good: No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin. As a 10-16 year old during WWII, I knew the names and some of the events, but had no real awareness or understanding of what it all meant. Reading this book is giving me a look at the things outside my immediate world that really shaped my childhood, perhaps my entire life.

The Wednesday Book Group is now in our winter mode and reading something different from anything we’ve read in a long time: The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch, first published in 1945. It’s a novel about the last days of Virgil, poet of the Aeneid, but very much reflects the events in Broch’s era (rise of Hitler). Broch was a Viennese Jew who was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1938, but released through the efforts of, among others, James Joyce. We spent most of our two hours yesterday reading aloud passages from the first 40 pages. The writing is lyrical, at times extremely dense, and always profound. It certainly fits our definition of how we choose a book: one that you wouldn’t read on your own.

I gave each of the Wednesday book group women a tube of the [Israeli] hand cream and they were delighted. Everyone smeared some on at once, their hands being cold and dry from the frigid weather we’re having. I also gave each a Shalom of Safed card which they loved. None had every heard of him or his work!

I described my experience at the AACI study vacation and my visit with Rachel Cane, granddaughter of Florence Sherwood of our group. It was the most complete yet concise “de-briefing” I’d given anyone about those 3 days, which crystallized it for me and seemed to interest – even amaze – the women. Three of them called me in the evening to thank me and tell me how much they’d learned.

The book group met today. Main topic: what to read this season. We had previously decided to read biographies. I went to Barnes and Noble two weeks ago and made a list of all the biographies I thought interesting for us and that were in paperback. I typed the list, about 50 possibilities, for everyone. Everybody picked five names. We went around the table and wrote down everyone’s choices. The name that had four votes was Mark Twain (not my vote). Josephus, a poet/homosexual named Lorca, and Frida Kahlo, a woman artist in Mexico who had an affair with Trotsky, each had three (all choices of mine as it happens). So that looks like our program this year.

We also decided not to look for a new member. We’re seven now with Tybell’s death [the previous July]. It’s the only catty thing we do — discussing some new woman to join us. Every possibility is well-read, intelligent, has some special talent and made known she’d like to be included. But this one “will never shut up and listen,” this one “has a voice that makes me cringe” and this one “won’t commit herself to coming every week.” Listen, the group came together 22 years ago. I’ve been included for 12 years. The chemistry among us is so special — and so fixed — that we’re all afraid to introduce anyone non-catalytic.

The book group has been doing Moby Dick. Also something one can’t appreciate too early in life. It is wonderful, a multi-level masterpiece. Some think the best thing every written by an American. The modern library version, which I took from you, with woodcut illustrations by Rockwell Kent, has just been reissued and selling for $17.95. I may buy a few copies to give as gifts.

I’ve got a new and enjoyable activity: I listen to books on tape, while driving in the car or walking or lying in bed instead of listening to the radio. … I’ve been borrowing them from the local library, which means you have to take whatever is available on the particular day you’re there. But there always seems to be at least one that is worth listening to.

I just became a subscriber to Recorded Books (you can rent an unabridged audio version of a book for about half the price of buying the tapes or the hardcover.) … My thought was to listen to classics, historical and fictional, while I do such things as iron, sew, fix dinner, driver around in the car, wait in doctors’ and dentists’ offices. So far it’s a delightful experience.

Shortly after undergoing disk surgery

After the physical therapy treatment I went to my Book Group. Yes, I started driving the car again about a week ago, but no more than about two miles in any direction. I went to the Book Group the second week home from the hospital and it was great for my morale. How I love those ladies! The book we’re reading, however, is a big disapointment: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Cambell, the great expert on world mythology.

The book group is reading Ulysses by James Joyce. The group read it once before I joined so everyone else is enjoying it because they know what it’s all about. I, on the other hand, am finding it a chore. But since it’s a marvel of its kind and changed the course of modern literature, I am treating it as a learning experience.