Chelsea Boes: Finding light in a book club reunion
Years ago, my husband Jonathan and I built a book club because we needed friends who wanted to read.
It was a daring move. What if it was really awkward and people hated it and our newborn cried the whole time?
Still, readers gotta read. And they also gotta share their brain furniture with other people who care about reading. At first, Jonathan and I picked all the titles. But it became swiftly apparent that the reading was better when other people got to choose too.
It takes sustained effort to share brain furniture, but mutual book reading can get you there faster than almost anything. Anything besides, maybe, mutual suffering.
For a really good book club, though, I think you need both.
When book club began, Jonathan and I were renting a worn Cape Cod in New Berlin, Pennsylvania. I popped popcorn on the stove. Jonathan brewed the coffee. When we had all settled on the living room couch and supplemental kitchen chairs, someone would open with, “So. Did you all do the reading?”
Some of us did all the reading all the time. Most of us did most of the reading some of the time.
The conversation heightened, laughter rose, and people started challenging other people’s opinions of the first book we read ("The Death of Ivan Ilyich" by Tolstoy). Derek snuck to the kitchen and stuck the cream back in the fridge. He hated it when milk got warm. Dave, chooser of the Puritan classic "The Bruised Reed," made puns about the Bible.
As years passed, I nursed a first daughter and then a second in the corner chair. Cindy, selector of "David Copperfield," brought a big chocolate raspberry bundt cake for the many birthdays celebrated during the long and peaceable reign of book club.
But the peace could not endure. We first met most of our book club members at the church where my husband served on staff, where Derek ran the sound board, where Cindy catered Christmas dinners. That church, like many others, experienced a violent implosion during the COVID years. The splitting sent our book club members reeling in different directions. Some to new churches. Some to churchlessness. Some stayed at the church where we had all started and weathered the aftermath. Between quarantines, religious pain, and politics, book club felt broken. Eventually we stalled out in the middle of "The Brothers Karamazov." Soon after, Jonathan and I moved to Asheville for his new job.
And even though we left physically, I had to leave our church emotionally, too. I broke up with our old church using the following three guiding principles:
1) Things are both better and worse than you think. You’re not the expert on what happened. 2) Believe the best about people, because “love always hopes.” 3) Don’t poison yourself by marinating in past wrongs. Look to the future.
But sometimes by miracle, you can look to the past and find light and right. This happened last week at our first ever Book Club Reunion.
Our family drove up 81 for eight and half hours to see our families at Christmas. Hearing of our arrival, the Pennsylvania book club whipped up a reunion. Cindy and Dave hosted, and Cindy of course made dessert — including a cupcake with a candle in it to celebrate my first-born’s 8th birthday. Only two members were missing, and one video-called in.
Emily, chooser of sociological deep-dives such as "The Girls who Went Away" and "The New Jim Crow," had started running ultra-marathons and looked happy. Derek, the warm-milk-hater and recommender of "Class" and Agatha Christie’s "And Then There Were None," had finished accounting school and joined the Orthodox Church. Jenna (who introduced us to "Hinds’ Feet on High Places") was studying kinesiology and, as always, making us laugh.
But like in a good book, things got serious quick. Katie (chooser of "All the Light We Cannot See") told us difficult medical news she had gotten just days before. Dave and Cindy had fresh church troubles. And Jonathan and I have a kid who just got diagnosed with special needs.
We shared these gaping wounds with each other, swapped details, promised to pray, and thanked each other for real company. (Of course I also wondered: Is it time for a new book club in our home in WNC?)
Jonathan (picker of "Gilead" and McCarthy’s "The Road") took a bite of his chocolate cupcake. “So,” he joked, “Did everybody do the reading?”
We hadn’t. But that was never really the point, was it?
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Chelsea Boes: Finding light in a book club reunion
