sift & scatter: Good Reads

I'm lucky enough to be a member of the world's coolest book group. Why the coolest, you might ask? To be fair, I've never been a regular participant in any book group until this past year, but the consistency and accountability alone make this group one that works really well for me. We also have some lovely ladies who bring their humor, insight, and great energy to our meetings.

The structure is also very simple: We pick a book for each month, we read it over the course of the month, and then we take turns hosting the group, meeting, and chatting at our respective homes. We're a group of about ten, sometimes fewer when one of us has another commitment, which is always okay. We are not a stressful group. We allow for life to happen and flexibility is always generously granted. We have, on occasion, been known to meet in a wine bar, and this worked out nicely as well.

I suppose that, in all fairness, it's hard to say anything is the best when I've very little ground for comparison, but let's just say that being around this lovely group, chatting with them about what we've read while sipping a little wine and nibbling cheese, is exactly what I need in my life.

It's also a once a month commitment, which is about all I can comfortably sign up for these days, as my free time feels a little stretched after work. But even when I'm looking at the clock on book group days thinking, 'how am I going to have energy for two more hours of talking?' (I already do a lot of talking at my job to begin with), I always feel like something in me has been restored or validated after I meet with these ladies.

Maybe it's just the chance to talk about good writing, how a narrative is built, how lines move us into a new perspective, all of it reminding me of grad school and the work we are all so deeply invested in, and that this very important work isn't so very far away from us. Many of the women in our group are also writers, so a shared appreciation of the craft is indeed a happy addition to the experience. And usually our group meets on Thursdays, and I happen to like Thursdays quite a bit.

Tomorrow we will gather to discuss Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey, a novel about about a young woman who essentially runs away from her life and husband in New York and flies to New Zealand, where she hitchhikes from one town to the next, without a plan or any sense of when or where she'll land. She frequently moves in and out of haunting memories from her past, fixating on her relationship with her mother and her husband, her sister's tragic death, and as she travels, she makes attempts at unraveling the mess that's followed her up to this point in her adult life, but rather than find a sense of peace in her escape, she seems to only be descending further and further into a very dark, fragmented reality.

While her emotional and mental stability are tenuous at best, making the narrative one that becomes a bit surreal at times, as readers, we desperately want her to land, to find safety and human connection, even after she repeatedly tells us that human connection for her is impossible. And it's so good. So very dark and so very good. I'm excited to hear what others in my group have to say.

In case you're curious, here are a few of my favorite books that we've read and discussed over the past few months. I have to say, if you're considering joining a book group, or if you're already in one, you may agree that picking the books is often the hardest part. We've found that bringing a list of options to the meeting (often books we've been wanting to read or that we've been reading about) is a good way to lay all of our ideas in front of us, and then decide which one sounds right for each month.

We've been pretty happy with the results so far: