Or I could have titled this ‘Reading’ again. Or ‘Bibliofillies.’ Our book club celebrated its 18th anniversary this month with one of the best books we’ve ever read. Everyone gave it two thumbs up, and some of us included more fingers and toes. I personally gave it five thumbs up, who’s to say how many I get to give? I mean, if I can give zero fucks about something like … well, then surely I can give more thumbs up than are apparent, right?
This book is hands down one of the best reads I’ve experienced in my short life. And that’s what it’s about, life. Just the depth and breadth of “the ordinary orbit of one life,” which “at the time you’re living it you can sometimes think your life is nothing much…”
“Story was the stuff of life, and to realize you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.” This gorgeous Irish novel is about living each day with awareness and gratitude, kindness and compassion, and I felt honored that some of my fellow Fillies thought of me and the mindfulness that I preach as they were reading it. When we can step back and observe the reality of our unique and precious life as it unfolds, one breath, one detail at a time, we can more deeply appreciate each moment.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough to anyone. Please do yourself a favor, if you love to read, and get it now. Those Fillies who listen to books claim that it’s about if not the best narration they’ve ever listened to, and I don’t doubt them. I was glad I could hear the Irish brogue in my head, and several-many times I read a passage aloud to Wren, in my own poor imitation of the lyrical accent.
Speaking of lyrical, I found myself with a spare half hour this morning, and cracked open my piano for the first time in a year. Not only am I grateful for being able to read words, and for everyone who contributed to this skill, but I’m grateful for the ability to read music, and to Mrs. Tankel for teaching me that skill starting when I was in the first grade through high school.
I haven’t played much since the kittens came, and that’s amazingly coming up on eight years; I haven’t played at all since Covid, because the piano is a tiny bit out of tune, and, well, I just didn’t call the tuner. Until this afternoon: and he has put me in his rotation and will be here sometime this month. I’m grateful for John Blackburn, the hottest piano tuner on the western slope and maybe anywhere, and for Neighbor Robert, who tuned me into him. I’m also grateful to Robert for one day dropping the line, “…and of course you have Hanon,” to which I responded with an eloquent “huh?” And he gave me the Virtuoso Pianist exercise book that might have made all the difference when I was learning piano as a child. It’s a joy to play.
Wren isn’t too sure about piano, since today was the first time she heard it, but she was game, and stuck her nose in the way between my hands for a few exercises, but left as I began to play a Schubert waltz. She was long gone before I tried to sing along with ‘King of the Road,’ but that’s okay. I don’t need her with me every single moment. I’m so grateful that I have a piano, and to the Colonel for giving it as his last gift to me, and that I knew when I closed it the last time that I would get back to it eventually.
And I’m grateful, as always, for the inestimable cheese sandwich. And really, in the course of a day, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what I’m grateful for: so much!
Tonight I’m grateful for the annual Bibliofillies’ Christmas party, and a feature we all look forward to, Bob’s famous eggnog. Some of us are getting out more than others, but we all agreed to meet on Zoom for our festivities this year instead of in person. Our usual December hostess drove around the neighborhood through snow and sleet delivering her husband’s homemade eggnog, and carrying out our holiday book exchange, picking up and dropping off one wrapped book at each Filly’s house. A non-traditional tradition that I hope maybe next year we can dispense with; but we have adapted well to the ongoing pandemic, and it was delightful to gather the herd virtually and celebrate our dedication to each other and to the art of reading.
I’m grateful for these eight other women, and for those who were once fillies and moved away or chose to put their energy elsewhere. I’m grateful for the nearly two hundred books we’ve read together in almost seventeen years, and for the great recommendations we shared with each other tonight. Instead of a common book this month, we each brought our thoughts on titles we’ve read recently, which ranged from memoirs and historical fiction, to the non-fiction history of immunotherapy in The Breakthrough; from lexicographical adventures like Dictionary of Lost Words to the latest from Richard Powers, Amor Towles, and Anthony Doerr; and many more. I’m grateful for books, friends, and eggnog, and finally, for a small wet snow that has stuck to the ground.
I’m grateful for two new books to enjoy! I’m grateful I learned to read, grateful I love to read.
I might as easily have chosen to highlight my gratitude for the Bibiliofillies, but I am grateful today for letting go. I’m grateful for the capacity to quit reading a book, or watching a show, or otherwise removing my attention from one thing and turning it to another. This is the very essence of mindfulness, the ability and willingness to choose where we place our attention.
Tonight, the Bibliofillies met on zoom to discuss our month’s selection, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, by George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo, which we read awhile ago. The latter was a work of fiction; tonight’s subject, an academic analysis of numerous classic Russian short stories, and the arts of writing, and of reading. (I can’t tell you how many stories, because I didn’t get past the first chapter.) A few fillies loved it; some were almost neutral; the rest of us, well, to say we despised it would be an exaggeration, but needless to say the various opinions made for lively discussion. This is why I’m grateful, at least once a month, for the Bibiliofillies.
I bristled at the author’s (a middle-aged white man) initial assumption that he knew what I was thinking. From there it went downhill. Though I did find some redeeming features in what I read, I did not want to keep reading, one of Saunders’ essential criteria for a successful short story. My perspective aside, (for what does it matter anyway?), having this safe place to express it, laugh about it, adapt it, is… priceless.
It’s essential to adapting to be able to let go. There is so much to let go of every single day. I’m grateful that I can let go of attachment to ‘my’ point of view more and more often these days.
Life is so much easier now that I’m simply letting things be as they are, instead of trying to control them. I also used to bristle when people told me, “You think too much!” Turns out they were right, but for the wrong reasons. And if I didn’t hang onto an emotion, I couldn’t consider that it mattered. Letting go was never easy for me. So I clung to, among other things, my own judgements, expectations, mistakes; I harbored grudges, fed them with repetition. Michael was right: I did have a ‘victim mentality.’
Death is certain, time of death uncertain.
I’m so grateful that I’m learning to let go, of everything. Emotions can actually flow through, and that doesn’t make them less real or less valid. The faster I let go, the faster I learn the lesson. The lesson I learned this month was that I don’t have to finish reading every book, or watching every episode of every season of a show, or a movie to the end. I don’t always need to know what happens next: as in a bad dream, I can take my attention by the hand and walk away. I can choose where to spend my precious attention. I don’t know how much I have left. I’m grateful for letting go of things that don’t nurture me.
I’m grateful for the salutary effects of prednisone, which have given Stellar new strength to walk to the canyon. Today may have been the last time; or maybe not. Living in this strenuous uncertainty requires focus almost as complete as blowing glass: anything you drop could be catastrophic.Stellar was excited to see his buddies at Boyz Lunch today, as they were to see him looking so lively. I’m grateful for the option of gently, comfortably, letting go of this magnificent life that has graced my own for nearly fourteen years. And grateful for the geezers, too.I’m grateful for endless cherry tomatoes from the garden this summer; grateful to still have the stoneware bowl my mother made fifty years ago that holds them; grateful even so to know that if the bowl one day breaks I can easily let it go; and grateful for the imminent relief of letting go of garden maintenance, as we approach a hard freeze six nights away from now.
The Bibliofillies met for the first time in person since March 2020 tonight on my patio. I had planned to make a light supper for the nine of us, but realized last week when I got the brace on that that wasn’t going to work out. So I asked if we could do a potluck instead, and my wonderful fillies came through like the stars they are, with numerous salads and curried egg salad toasts and homemade pistachio gelato and cupcakes from Blue Sky Baking Company. It was a glorious, balmy evening full of joyful connection, and thoughtful conversation about the book I’d chosen, Klara and the Sun by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. Nobody liked it as well as I did, but the most controversial books usually stimulate the best discussion.
I’m so grateful for our book club! We steadfastly continued to meet through the pandemic via Zoom, and will likely return to that format as this illusory window of normalcy closes on the inevitable Delta variant in our predictably low-vaccinated county. And I’m grateful when we have visitors who have taken the time to also ‘consume’ the book. We discussed whether, if you listen to a book is it still called reading? I think so, but we tossed around some other possible words.
I’m also grateful for my stoic, resilient Stellar Stardog Son of Sundog, who’s been having a good week, so we’ve taken incrementally longer walks each day, shortly after sunrise while it’s still delightful cool. I’m grateful for cool nights. I’m grateful for cool, smooth sheets at the end of a fulfilling day. I wish similar comfort for you.
Books I unearthed while sorting through boxes in the attic…
I’m grateful for books. I’m grateful that my big brother taught me to read when I was just three years old. I remember sitting on the floor in the doorway between the well-lit kitchen and the dim living room where our parents sat, with a book between us, and him teaching me to make sense of the letters. I’m grateful that I love to read, that I have always loved to read, that my parents gave me lots of books, and that I have always had access to anything I could wish to read. I’m grateful that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, and grateful that someone (though it’s not clear exactly who) invented the novel. I’m grateful for bookbindings, libraries, magazines, and Kindle, and for paper and ink, typewriters, and Pages.
Today I’m grateful for the Bibliofillies, a bookclub Ellie started in April 2005, which has always had a cap of ten people, and still retains five founding members. There are currently nine of us, and we all live in the outskirts of our little town. For all those years we’ve met on the first Wednesday evening of each month, rotating among our homes, and our format has evolved through the years but a few things have remained constant.
We start each meeting with an author report by the hostess. OK, one thing has remained constant! There was a time when the hostess often chose to make a full meal for the group, but it’s always been ok to serve chips and dip instead. In summer we’ve met on patios, in winter we’ve carpooled through deep snow. Since Covid, we’ve met monthly on Zoom, and here’s the second thing that’s constant: the camaraderie that has developed among us through the years.
The first book we read was Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, a novel published in 1881. I remember meeting in Connie’s cozy adobe living room, and there was much dissent about the book. It was a good realization that we can sometimes have even more engaging conversations if we don’t all feel the same about a book. Since then, we’ve had an ongoing discussion on “What is Literature?” One husband calls us “The Smarty Pants Bookclub,” because there’s another book club in town, which many call “The Fun Bookclub.”
I can’t remember half of these, but here’s a (nearly complete) list of the books we read in our first ten years together:
Portrait of a Lady Henry James
Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
O Pioneers! Willa Cather
A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
The Haunted Monastery, Robert Van Gulik
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
The Cave, Jose Saramago
Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence
A Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
Passionate Nomad, Jane Geniesse
Saving Fish from Drowning, Amy Tan
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
East Wind: West Wind, Pearl S. Buck
The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams, Lynne Withey
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
The Blind Assasin, Margaret Atwood
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris
Arthur and George, Julian Barnes
Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer
The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz
Stories of Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov
Herzog, Saul Bellow
Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie
My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
The Greenlanders, Jane Smiley
The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love, Oscar Hijuelos
White Ghost Girls, Alice Greenway
The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
The Ginseng Hunter, Jeff Talarigo
The Leopard, Guiseppe de Lampedusa
The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
The Quiet Girl, Peter Hoeg
Rabbit is Rich, John Updike
A Mercy, Toni Morrison
Desert, LeClezio
The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
Telex from Cuba, Rachel Kushner
Little Bee, Chris Cleave
That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Olga Grushin
The Appointment, Herta Muller
Vanity Fair, William Thackeray
The Help, Kathyrn Stockett
Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson
Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle, Ingrid Betancourt
Tinkers, Paul Harding
Dog of the South, Charles Portis
Trading Dreams of Midnight, Diane McKinney-Whetstone
Undaunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West, Dorothy Wickenden
The Elephant’s Journey, Jose Saramago
People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
Reader’s choice: Mario Vargas Llosa
Killing Mother, Rita Clagett
Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, Christie Watson
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness, Clay Jenkinson
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt
The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh
The Invisible Ones, Stef Penney
Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith & Love, Dava Sobel
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bolgakov
Room: A Novel, Emma Donoghue
The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje
The Stone Raft, Jose Saramago
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt
Strength in What Remains, Tracy Kidder
Mary Coin, Marisa Silver
The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain
Proust at the Majestic, Richard Davenport-Hines
Remembering Babylon, David Malouf
What Maisie Knew, Henry James
Reader’s choice: Books by Mo Yan
The Sumbally Fallacy, Karen Weinant Gallob
The Emerald Mile, Kevin Fedarko
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Kay Joy Fowler
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Americanah, Chimananda Adichie
Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, Poe Ballantine
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert
The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey
The Emperor of Paris, C.S. Richardson
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Roz Chast
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, Jan-Philipp Sendker
Submergence, J.M. Ledgard
The Antagonist, Lynn Coady
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty
Who can say we’re not fun? Now, I don’t have permission, so I can’t share the screenshot I took of us toward the end of our meeting tonight. It’s not Wednesday, you might be thinking if you’re on your toes: No, but last Wednesday we were derailed by circumstances beyond our control, which several wanted to keep watching on their screens, so this was our makeup meeting. If I could, I’d share the screenshot, and prove to everyone that we are too fun! Last month we read Louise Erdrich’s dystopian novel “Future Home of the Living God,” which started out a page turner, and ended up a colossally distressing parallel, in some ways, to our own current precarious political and societal cusp between democracy and fascism.
None of us gave the book a full Thumbs Up, and several gave it a solid Thumbs Down, and after a record-short discussion there was a pause that cried for some levity. I put on a pig nose and ears, and gave a tutorial on Zoom video filters, and soon we were all laughing. Rosie sat by the seaside with a pirate patch and hat, Candy wore a mustache with the cosmos behind her. Many combinations of backgrounds, frames, antlers, hats, noses, spectacles and hirsute adornments later, we called it a night. Smarty pants indeed! I am indeed grateful for my smarty-pants, big-hearted, open-minded, thoughtful and funny Bibliofillies.
