2021 Book Club Roundup

(Written by Karen Bardsley for club annual report 2021)

Thanks to the pandemic, the EBSC Book Club’s 27th year was virtually all virtual. Due to a post-vaccine lull in the infection rate this summer, we were able to hold one in-person meeting. In July we had a hybrid meeting at Charmaine Detweiler’s home in Lafayette. Four members joined in via Zoom, but the rest of us gathered in a large circle in a living room just like in the before times. It was wonderful to see so many friends face to face rather than stacked up in little boxes on a computer screen.

Sadly, by August the Delta variant forced us back online. Fortunately, we have become quite adept at Zoom meetings over the last year and a half. In fact, we often have more attendees at these meetings than we had at our meetings before the pandemic. I guess the lack of a commute and the ability to meet in fuzzy slippers are still paying dividends.

We may have a modern cyberspace format, but we still stick to many of our book club traditions. We read a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, and we are committed to choosing titles from authors with a diversity of racial and ethnic backgrounds. This year five of our eleven book selections were by authors of color and six of our authors were born in countries other than the United States. We kept up our practices of reading a book in translation (Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) and a classic novel by a female author (Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway). As usual, we celebrated the start of a new school year by reading the Smith Reads selection in September (Exit West by Mohsin Hamid). In December, we will wrap up the year with our annual poetry night, where each member brings a poem to read out loud and discuss. In fact, it seems the only tradition that we didn’t uphold this year, for obvious reasons, was our summer theater trip. Instead, in June several members of the book club attended EBSC’s virtual tour of the Oakland Museum of California’s collection of the photographs of Dorothea Lange.

Hopefully, 2022 will see the return of both our in-person meetings and our summer group outing. In the meantime, our monthly Zoom discussions of the fascinating people, places and philosophies presented in the works that we read provide a welcome break from the doom and gloom of current events.