Ode to Book Club

At least, a prosaic one.

The ladies are headed to my house this evening for our monthly book club. In our book club, we meet once a month. We rotate houses. We meet at 6:30 pm on a weeknight. We pay dues, which are tucked away into a cookie jar. When we have enough cash, we splurge. (Two years ago we went to the beach for a winter weekend of fine dining, hot tubbing, and book talk.) In our book club we have seven members, ages ranging from the thirties to the several decades wiser than thirties. We highly value this mixture of spunk and spit (or spit and spunk, really). In our book club, the hostess prepares a homemade meal (often lavish, but not required) from scratch and uses her good plates. Often the hostess will prepare food that fits the setting of the novel. In our book club, we have "check in", meaning we move around the dinner table telling what has happened in our lives since last book club. (Years of personal narrative add up to a rich tapestry. Ugh, that was so cheesy, but true.) We save our book discussion for after dinner. The leader, who selected the book, gets us started, often providing an author's biography or other salient details. Sometimes she uses prepared reading guide questions. Often, she just says (the equivalent of) "Go!"