Do You Enjoy Good Books,
Lively Conversation,
A Fun Night Out?

Story by Colleen Fitzpatrick

Jackie Takiff of Simsbury, Becky Kimberly of West Hartford, and Lisa Zimmerman of Glastonbury are a decade or more apart in age, but they share at least one thing: Each woman belongs to a book club in her town. And each agrees that if the club were to go, so would a piece of her life.

That’s because their book groups represent more than a love of reading, or an intellectual stimulus, or an excuse for getting together with friends, or a way of meeting people, or an evening away from the kids, or any of the other assorted reasons people give for why they join such reading groups. For each woman, her book club helps to define her sense of community and perhaps even herself.

“What we lack – community – is a big problem in modern civilization in America, especially in a rural area like Simsbury,” says Takiff, an England-born retired art teacher and textile designer who leads the Simsbury Public Library’s evening book club for adults. “People have to make a real effort to become part of a community. We all need community and a book club is community. It’s people getting together around a common interest.”

What would life be like for Kimberly without her women’s book club? “I would definitely feel a loss,” says the mother of two and part-time church administrator. “I really love my book club. It has evolved from getting together to discuss books to listening to and supporting each other. It’s become a bigger thing. It’s wonderful.”

While book clubs in some form have been around for centuries, many people credit Oprah Winfrey with sparking the culture’s current mania for reading groups, through her devotion to authors, books, and reading – on her television show, in her magazine, and on her web site.

Book discussions “are a natural area of intellectual conversation,” says James Miller, head of adult services at the Simsbury library. People join, he surmises, because “they need more out of the interaction involved in reading than they can get by themselves. Or they feel so strongly about what they read that they need to express their opinions. Or, maybe more importantly, they feel strongly about wanting to hear the views of others; they’re looking for a different perspective on what they read.”

The most loosely defined book groups occur online, where resources abound. People can contribute to or simply view book discussions. They can get book advice from online booksellers and follow book-clubbers on Twitter. They can peruse or join sites such as www.librarything.com, which enables its claimed 850,000 users to participate in online discussions, write reviews, keep track of their reading and connect with people, either virtually or in person, who have similar reading tastes.

Yet the array of online resources has done nothing to diminish the preference for flesh-and-blood book clubs, and perhaps has even fueled it.

“I now know women from all over town whose paths would never cross with mine if not for this book club. I just love that it brought us together,” says Zimmerman, founder of a women’s book club in Glastonbury. It offers “a chance to meet and get to know people who wouldn’t otherwise be in my day.”

Another member of that group, Becky Freiberg, says that the club enables her “to socialize with women I really enjoy, and to broaden my knowledge base and even what I’m aware of in the world and how issues are affecting other people.”

Zimmerman in 2006 recruited about 16 friends and acquaintances from the town pool, schools and other venues for the club. It meets monthly in someone’s home – the hosting rotates among the members – and, over wine, appetizers and dessert, they discuss books such as Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout, The Kommandant’s Girl by Pam Jenoff, and Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. The host chooses the book, kicks off the discussion and provides the eats.

Across the river in West Hartford, Kimberly’s book club has been meeting monthly since 2004, when a couple of moms in a babysitting cooperative launched the group. It comprises about 12 women who take turns hosting in their homes. Members operate along the lines of their east-of-the-river counterparts – only instead of wine, these women sip their signature drink: cosmopolitans. The book talk invariably leads them to other, more personal topics during the three-hour discussion.

“These women are my sister-friends,” says Trish Accetta, a mother and substitute librarian. “They’ve really become the go-to people for me for advice and support.” The bond deepens as they discuss books such as American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld and reveal more about themselves, their politics and other views, knowing that what they say will be received with respect, she says.

Among this group, the socializing doesn’t end when the last woman departs for the evening. Members vacation at homes on Cape Cod in July and Newport, R.I., in March. For one woman’s 45th birthday, the group celebrated with karaoke at a local Asian restaurant. And a member’s husband once took the group for a sail on the Connecticut River.

These bookwomen even have a name for themselves, the Jugabees, along with a logo: a bee holding a cosmopolitan in one hand and a book in the other. (The name came about when the women were discussing whether to read James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. One woman wondered aloud what it was about and someone went to the computer in another room and called out, “It’s about drug abuse,” which someone heard as, “It’s about jugabees.”)

At a more formal point along the book-club organizational spectrum is the one Takiff leads at the Simsbury library. Members draw up a reading list during the summer and the library rounds up and lends the books. Participants – there are 12 to 15 core members out of a total of about 50 members – discuss the books for 1½ hours while sitting at chairs and tables arranged in a big square. There are no refreshments.

“I like structure,” Takiff says. Running the session “as a coffee klatch – I don’t think the group as a whole would embrace that. It’s my job to keep the book group in line and keep them on the book. I don’t think they want to hear about personal situations. For this group, it’s about the book.”

Her goal as facilitator is simple: “I want it to be a fantastic evening, where everybody has a wonderful time, and I want to have a lot of energy in the room. … I want everyone who comes to get what they want out of it,” Takiff says.

In short supply at most book clubs are men. But lay no blame for that at John Rusnock’s feet: He leads or participates in no fewer than eight book groups, including two at the Simsbury library. He has mused over the lack of male participation in such groups but, “Like the experts, I came up with no reasons or answers” to explain it, says Rusnock, who traces his love of reading to his Navy days a half century ago and the long stretches at sea.

Book group leaders say that while their duties can be time-consuming, only a few talents are needed: a willingness to prepare for the discussion, some conversation-leading skills and a lot of enthusiasm. This enthusiasm, aided by the Internet’s search and communication capabilities, increasingly is propelling authors into the middle of local book-club circles.

For the group Rusnock leads at the East Granby Public Library, he asked author Charles J. Shields to talk about Mockingbird, his biography of Harper Lee. Shields was only too happy to oblige and spoke to the group by phone link from his home in Virginia.

Members of the Simsbury library book group once were so divided in their interpretation of the ending to The Space Between Us that one person e-mailed the author, Thrity Umrigar, to settle the matter.

Book clubs have sparked passion in bigger ways, as well. The Children in Room E4 by Susan Eaton is one of the rare nonfiction, non-memoir books that the Glastonbury members have read. Chosen by Zimmerman, the book addresses racial and economic segregation in schools by following a third-grade boy in teacher Lois Luddy’s class at Hartford’s Simpson Waverly Elementary School. The book-club discussion eventually turned to the contrast in educational resources between Glastonbury and Hartford. The bookwomen decided they wanted to do something. Zimmerman called Luddy, and each child in her class ended the school year with a brightly wrapped copy of a book in the Poppy and Rye series.

Which underscores Takiff’s point: What is a book club about if not community?

“We long for connection, but we want casual connection,” she says. “We want something that’s free, something we can go to or not go to, no pressure, no stress. And we want to feel that when we go, we’ll be welcomed and that what we have to say is important. So a book club does fit that bill. I don’t know of many other activities in the (Farmington) Valley that do. People do have different needs, and community is a big one.

“By joining a book club,” she continues, “you don’t have to find somebody to do something with. Once you walk through the door, your responsibility is over. You don’t even have to read the book if you don’t want to.”

Colleen Fitzpatrick is a freelance writer who lives in Simsbury. She is a frequent contributor to Seasons.