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:

1. 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;
2. 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;
3. 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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