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We dip into our mailbag for today's blog treats. Inspired by our book club article for Washingtonian magazine this month, writer James Zug sends in this note about his own book group conversion. Zug's latest book is American Traveler: The Life and Adventures of John Ledyard, the Man Who Dreamed of Walking the World and he is also the co-author of two monstrously amazing boys.
Septugarian Book Clubbing, By James Zug
I joined my first book club last year.
For years I poo-pooh my wife’s book club as an excuse for her friends to get together, drink too much wine and gossip with and about their friends, their offspring and their friends’ offspring.
I was mostly jealous.
Then my wife and I had a baby. And another. The mewling dollops of love and skin tripled the endemic isolation of a freelance writer. Last summer, when my wife’s cousin asked me to join his book club, I leapt at the chance. A pass to go out once every six weeks was easily granted (it was her family after all).
Pete and I and another book club member, Mendy, drove down to Logan Circle for the first meeting. When we crossed Rock Creek, I attempted to give directions, but Mendy said, “Oh, no, you go this way.” I shut up. She was right. She knew this clever backcut over to 13th Street. She talked about moving to this place before her marriage. And then another neighborhood after the kids were born. And another. She had even spent a couple of years as a child on my block, one street over. By the time we arrived in Logan Circle, I had learned about two dozen different places in the District where she had lived..
There were about eighteen attenders at the book club. They were all at least in their sixties. They prefaced their comments: “my father, who fought in the First World War” or “when I was getting my Ph.D. in the fifties.” Everyone seemed to have children who were doing great things (arguing before the Supreme Court, making films with famous people) and grandchildren doing anything. After a few minutes of chit-chat, we arranged ourselves in a living room and got to talking.
Two hours went by before we came up for air. Although the majority of the people were men—bold, strong-willed men—and one woman quietly knitted away, it was not a stereotypical male-dominated scene. The women gave as good as they took. The knitter pearled away while reducing arguments to shreds. Everyone interrupted each other. Everyone was extremely well-read and it turned out that about half the group moonlighted in at least one other book group (one did two others). It was a bit like an eighteenth-century Parisian salon, with both sexes talking and listening.
My fears of being forced to read horribly lite books was immediately abated. I decided to stick it out.
The club does history books. They’ve have been very good and sometimes deliciously obscure. We’ve done predictable new books that sometimes were slipping onto bestseller lists: Ellis on George Washington, Hochschild on ending the slave trade, Kearns Goodwin on Lincoln and Shapiro on Shakespeare. We did a violently persuasive polemic by Amis fils about Stalin. We also did two almost unreadable university press books, one on the Fourth Crusade and one on the eastern influences on western culture. Right now we are doing one on Richard Burton. (Don’t even ask which one.)
We now meet at Mendy’s house out in Chevy Chase. She provides a cheese board on a huge slab of slate with each cheese labeled in chalk. Last time, we digressed to discuss the new Medicare proscription plan (no one knew how it worked) and then a very long and gossipy discussion of the 1989 impeachment of district court judge Alcee Hastings.
I knew nothing about this and when I told my wife when I got home, she said my book club was getting to be worse than hers. I agreed, but added that at least the gossip was about healthy things like drugs and corruption.
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