The third Thursday of every month the book club I belong to meets at our community center. This month’s read is In Every Mirror She’s Black by author Lola Akinmade Akerstrom, her debut novel. A story about three black women, each with a dissimilar background from various countries, coming to live in Sweden. As always, I’m interested in what my fellow book club members have to say about the novel, characters, themes, plot and setting. Our discussions are usually quite lively and our views disparate. Ordinarily, I leave with my mind opened to alternate perceptions, themes and interpretations. And, that’s a great thing for an aging brain!
I joined the club with three purposes in mind:
- To re-ignite my habit and love of reading. From an early age I spent countless hours reading. Books took me to other worlds, other people’s lives and other ideas beyond my own place in life. Now, I wanted to not only enter diverse venues as a voyeur of the characters’ lives, personalities and quirks, I was on a quest to maintain cognition as I aged. According to the National Institutes of Health reading is one of the activities, which not only supports cognitive function and memory retention, it may also slow diseases like Alzheimers;
- To meet people and become part of my new community. And, what a welcoming community it is. This past January when I entered the large many windowed room, I was immediately welcomed as the ‘new’ person, handed a name tag with a string attached, a black magic marker and instructions to write my first and last name on the tag. The newbie no more, at the August meeting I was the one greeting and instructing an unfamiliar face among us;
- To increase the amount of reading I carried out. I learned a long time ago, you can’t be a writer, at least not a good writer, without also being a reader. In the last decade I’d squeezed in fewer and fewer reads. Author Stephen King, according to his memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, reads upwards of 80 books per year. Yikes! Considering the number of books he’s written, besides reading and writing he must do little else.
While I’m no where near reading 80 books per year, belonging to the book club has done exactly what I sought. I’m reading an average of 3 books per month now, so by the end of 2023 I may make it to about half of what Stephen King reads in a year. My love of reading has reignited taking me to wherever I want to go to meet whoever happens to be living on those pages. As I explore various characters, themes, plots, settings and author styles reading makes me use my brain to analyze, remember and just plain think. Not all the books I read are fiction. It’s the non-fiction, the stories of real, living, breathing people or those long gone, but leaving a story meant for telling, which make me ponder the world in which we live, how we got here and what the future will hold.
In our modern technology driven era I originally thought I would buy and read all my books through Kindle. I transformed Martin’s old tablet into my Kindle by downloading the app. At first I liked the idea of a less expensive version of a book on a device, which would hold many, many books, slim and easy to carry or store. Traditional bound volumes take up volumes of space. It took a few months for me to miss the feeling of the heft of a book in my hands, fingers leafing through the pages perhaps lingering to re-read a paragraph or two, writing the occasional observation in the margins or using one of my many book markers to note where I left off. Now, I do some of both, buying the electronic version for light reading while obtaining the paperback version of others. I also look to the local library shelves, if I’m lucky enough to get there before some of my fellow club members, and book exchanges like the one we have at our community center. In turn, after reading a paper printed book, I donate it to the exchange for someone else’s reading pleasure.
Of all the benefits from participating in the book club, the greatest return is that I’m making new friends as we get to know each other through reading and a mutual respect for books and their creators. I’m connecting. I am becoming a part of the greater community in which I will live providing me with a sense of belonging. I leave our sessions feeling uplifted and excited about my future in this community. Books can open up all kinds of worlds to us including the one we live in today.
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Kathy's Retirement Blog 
Thanks Kathy! I’m adding that book to my TBR list. I love to read and
so glad to hear it helps with dementia! I was in a book club for about 5
years (2009-2013) and I liked it quite a bit (especially the first 3-4
years) but after a while I wanted to read on my own. Both ways have
advantages! I only read about 1 book per month which means it isn’t
looking good for me to tackle the 385 books on my list! I can’t live
long enough. Hopefully, we can read in heaven!
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Renee, my book club including me did not give the book high ratings! A couple of our group really liked it, but the majority felt like the characters were not fully developed, the outcomes of the characters was too predictable, so not a can’t-put-it-down read. It wasn’t until the last 50 pages or so that it got interesting and it’s a 404 page book. I’d recommend reading some reviews before deciding whether or not to read it. I don’t know if I will ever tire of this book club, but I’m only 9 months into it. K
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beautifully written as always. Thank you from the east coast of South Africa.
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Theodora, Thank you for reading all the way from the east coast of South Africa. K
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Right on
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Kathy, I belong to book clubs (yes, I’m in 2!) for all the same reasons plus one other. It is a place for more substantive conversations. We talk about ideas, social ramifications, how our upbringing impacted us, and more. Other conversations with friends can be more “superficial”. And a bit gossipy or repetitive. Last night at a friend’s dinner gathering someone actually declared, “no hurricane talk, I’m so tried of that”. We all laughed, but complied.
I’m an avid reader, but I tend to like light reading – modern romance novels, mysteries. I like closure in a book. My book clubs challenge me to read books I never would have chosen for myself. Often thought provoking or distressing. The last book, when I was asked did I like it, I had to answer, “not really, but I found it compelling.”
It’s lovely to hear you’re finding community in your new location. My book club and garden club have both given me that here!
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Pat, Than you for your insight. The discussions my club has are also more in-depth than most conversations I have with other people. We tend to take the themes and compare them to our individual experiences, so we learn something about each other, which leads to stronger, more satisfying relationships. I did not like the book we just read as the characters were not developed and the plot became predictable. However, I, too, find myself reading books I probably wouldn’t have chosen to read. That allows room for a wider view of the world as well as my fellow club members. I like that very much. It’s taken a lot of effort to find community where I feel like I fit in and am welcomed. Our community center turned out to be the key to my finding those things. I’m a joiner, so once I found it everything just started falling into place. K
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