2022 Book Club Roundup

(Written by Karen Bardsley for club annual report 2022)

Our book club turned 28 this year, and it turns out that you can teach an old club new tricks! Emboldened by vaccines and boosters, but still respecting everyone’s need to make their own health decisions, we used 2022 to perfect the art of the hybrid meeting. A surge in Covid infections kept us on-line at the beginning of the year; however, in April we started meeting both in person and in pixels. Each month about half of us gathered at a host’s home, while the other half joined in via Zoom. It has taken a while to determine how best to arrange the screens, cameras, microphone, and speaker. However, I think we have finally gotten everything figured out, and conversations are flowing naturally once more. 

Our reading selections this year were the usual mix of fiction and non-fiction. By November, we will have read seven novels (three of which were based on actual people and events), three memoirs, and a collection of essays. As usual, we chose authors from a wide range of backgrounds, including six authors of color. We also continued our traditions of reading at least one work in translation (Frederick Backman’s My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry) and of reading the annual Smith Reads selection (Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness). In fact, we developed the Smith theme a bit further this year. In May, we read Lauren Willig’s Band of Sisters, a novel based on the true story of a group of Smith graduates who traveled to France in 1917 to provide aid to villagers caught up in World War I. In July, we continued the alum theme with Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France. 

One of the highlights of the year was the post-pandemic return of our summer outing. In August, over a dozen of us gathered at the Oakland Museum of California to tour their Hella Feminist exhibit, which celebrated some of the lesser-known history of diverse feminism in the Bay Area. The museum has not yet reintroduced docent-led tours, but we enjoyed exploring the exhibit together. Afterwards, many of us gathered in the café to chew over both snacks and the exhibit.