book groups

[boxofdelights]

Fort Collins is a bookish town. When we moved here I read somewhere that Fort Collins was the American city with the highest number of post-baccalaureate degrees per capita. I can't find confirmation of that anywhere, but here's another factoid that supports my opinion: Fort Collins won the NaNoWriMo book drive. We donated more books than the second-place entire city of Chicago. We donated more books than the entire city of New York.

So it's not surprising that even I, shy and socially inept as I am, can find a satisfying book group here. In fact, I have three: the one amaebi calls the Once and Future Book Group, because I was in it for eleven years, then dropped out for nine, then dropped back in, which I got invited to because the founder's husband was my husband's coworker and friend; the science fiction book group, which I fell in love with sight unseen last summer when I walked past the bookstore where they meet and discovered that they were about to read three books in a row by people I had met at Wiscon; and the library book group, which I also dropped out of when I had no energy for anything but have just dropped back into. Today we voted for the six books we'll read this year. I pitched Code Name Verity, but the six winners were

Still Alice, by Lisa Genova
Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain
Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward
The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson
The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht

Our Friends of the Library are flush enough to buy twenty copies of each title, which get shared among the book group; if you get one, you can keep it or donate it back to the library to create a Book Group Kit, which is a box that can be checked out containing ten copies of the book, information about the author, reviews of the book, and discussion questions. There's one for Farthing, which I pitched successfully a few years ago.

It's a bookish town.

Comments

[schemingreader]

All this time, I was imagining Fort Collins, because it is the only city in your state where I've been. I'm amazed that is where you actually live. What a beautiful place!

I have also started going to book groups, though I wound up skipping the two that met last night. I'm doing a comic/graphic novel one--I've been to two meetings--and I found a meet-up one that seems more serious. I never think of myself as a person with social anxiety, but I seem to have caught some over the last few years somehow. Book groups seem so easy--I do the homework and then I have a lot to say.

Maybe too much to say.

It would be so nice if I could be in a book group with the likes of you. The exact likes, I mean.

[boxofdelights]

I would love to be in a book group with you too! What you say about the books you read is always interesting.