Longtime book club lurking right beneath Mirror's nose

Starting a book club was "the best thing I ever did in my former town, when my children were small and I had stopped reading," says Michelle.

Not only did she begin reading again, Michelle started hanging out in libraries and eventually went back to school to get her Masters of Library Sciences degree. And her second book club, the one she started in Highland Park, has been going strong for seven years, with 14 members and a plethora of books and good times.

On a recent May evening, the traveling book club made the journey to Lori's house in Princeton to talk about Elizabeth Strout's connected stories, Olive Kitteridge. Most members agreed it was a good read: "a very personal story," said new member Iris. The stories take place in fictional Crosby, Maine, where Olive lives as a school teacher, mother, wife, friend and adversary to some. Over the course of the several stories, you get to see different perspectives from a cast of eccentric small town folk, and Olive herself seems to change ever so slightly. "Strout was able to get into the character's head and she was a complicated character," Lori said. "She did it through so many accessible stories, not just through the perceptions of one person."

Never one to hold back, Olive has helped many of her students, scared more of them and even terrerized her son when he was a child. But just as often she has had the intuition to be there at the right time to actually rescue a few souls. "She's reaching out to people, other people who had also been in difficult situations," Barb said. "Olive was finding ways to interact with them."

"There's something everyone can pick out about themselves in Olive," Lori said. "In a sense, she is all of us."

According to several members, the club is very social. "The first book we read was Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, a novel about a hermaphrodite, growing up in a Greek family with a lot of twists and turns," Michelle said. "I served Greek food to complement the book." They also took Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love In The Time of Cholera, about a love triangle that survived for half a century, as an opportunity for a Mexican & Spanish buffet.

When they read Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrape, a graphic novel of growing up in Iran during the 1979 Islamic revolution and its aftermath, they also watched Satrape’s feature length film of the story.

 

Other popular selections recently have included Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife, another historical novel; Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, a memoir of a book group living under Iran’s restrictive, fundamentalist government; Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain; The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (a young-adult novel that has proven popular with adults); John Irving's new novel Last Night in Twisted River, and a very long historical novel, Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet.

One of the books that had mixed reactions was The Elegance of the Hedghog, Muriel Barbery's story of a Parisian apartment building and its concierge. While the snooty residents barely register her existence (though she is better-read than most of them), one kindred spirit in the building -- a twelve year old who hates her bourgeois parents -- emerges as the second voice of the narrative, through her journal.

 

The members are organized and each month's host provides the food, in exchange for getting to select the book that month. "It's nice to pick a few months ahead, and know what we're going to reading," Barb said.

 

Members are mostly from Highland Park, but they also roam Route 1 to a few other Central Jersey homes. "It's fun to have people from other towns," longtime member Debbie says. "You get to talk about other high schools than just your own."

"You never really know anybody, until you know their story," Michelle said.

You might say this group has gotten to know quite a few stories and quite a few people along the Route 1 corridor.