My Kind of Book Club
Our Town downtown
March 12, 2007
Reading the book is optional, and they serve cookies
I’ve always avoided book clubs although I do a fair amount of reading and I think I recall that I enjoy talking about books. What I don’t like is frantically paging through a book trying to prefabricate a semi-intelligent comment that will make it appear as though I’ve read the book, then spending so much energy trying to figure out where in the discussion to insert that comment that I am incapable of listening to anyone else. I spent more than enough time doing that in college.
I have found my book club.
Last Thursday marked the third meeting of the Seaport Book Club, sponsored by the South Street Seaport Museum, and my second attempt at attending. Back in January I paid $13.95 for David Cordingly’s book about pirates, “Under the Black Flag,” and the grinning skull on its spine has sat on my bookshelf deriding my profligacy ever since. I didn’t make it that time. Thursday evening all the way down on Water Street is a commitment.
This month’s selection – Joan Druett’s “She Captains: Heroines and Helliones of the Sea” – was hard to find. It wasn’t in stock at any Barnes & Nobles in Manhattan, and I’ll be honest, when I finally did get my hands on it at the library, it wasn’t very good. Didactic feminism and a bibliography half as long as the book itself is an inauspicious combo.
“Thus it can be seen that women were as distinguished for bold enterprise as their male equivalents,” Druett writes in the introduction, having given the reader a smattering of instances of she-mariners from various continents and centuries that did not make for a very comprehensive argument. “The rivers and beaches and seas were equal-opportunity spheres back then,” she concludes.
I dutifully slogged through a few chapters, and was rewarded with some entertaining snippets about cross dressing sailor “boys,” and female lighthouse keepers who were completely abashed by the media frenzy that followed a “heroic” rescue for what was, to them, a part of the job description. All in all, however, skimming seemed sufficient.
Perhaps not the best choice of book, but apparently it’s Women’s History Month. And that would make the other attendees more interesting anyway. Who would want to read this book at all, much less read it and then plod through it again with the group?
But then, as 6 p.m. approached, butterflies started fluttering ever so gently in my stomach. I had spent maybe an hour with the book, and I wasn’t allowed to take it out of the library, so all I had was a haphazard page of barely legible notes: passages I had copied in order to deride them in this column.
I was suddenly afraid I didn’t have much to contribute. They weren’t going to, like, call on me, were they?
I shot off an email to the book club coordinator, Leslie Shope, asking if she happened to have an extra copy of the book on hand (so I could pull my move if I had to. You know, the impromptu “close reading”).
Her response, though very friendly, made me slightly uncomfortable. She wrote: “I don’t have an extra copy, but you’re welcome to use mine. I’ve been taking notes all day, so I won’t need it too much.”
Taking notes all day! Oh no. This was a seriously academic gathering. That on top of the last e-mail she’s written in response to my RSVP – “It should be a small group, but good conversation” – made me decide I didn’t want to go anymore. (Small group equals greater obligation on each person to not be a dud.) I felt the scratchings of a sore throat, too.
Alas, it was Thursday night, and I had a Water Log to write. But I was in a bad mood, and that was not made better by the fact that I had dawdled to the point where there was no way to avoid being late.
What a pleasant surprise it was, then, when I barged into the Melville Gallery five minutes after six and (a) not one of the five people seated around the table gave me a look when I made a racket taking off my coat, and scarf, and hat, and gloves, (b) excluding Leslie, only one person had read the book, and those who had not unabashedly admitted it and (c) there were two plates of cookies.
Discussion ranged from related to the book (“Let’s hear some of those stories!” a woman exhorted Leslie) to somewhat relevant (“The Pirate Queen,” a play about Grace O’Malley, is opening on Broadway) to tangential (“I miss grubby old South Street”) to way off target (“What about this woman astro-nut?”).
Most, if not all of the six people who eventually showed up had come before, and there was an emerging easiness about the conversation that was as warm as the light on the gallery’s wood floors and beams.
“Next month,” said Leslie, wrapping up, “is ‘Moby Dick.’”
“That’s a big book!” shouts a white-haired man. “I’m not going to read that! I think I’m going to read Cliff’s Notes!”
I think I might, too.
March 12, 2007
Reading the book is optional, and they serve cookies
I’ve always avoided book clubs although I do a fair amount of reading and I think I recall that I enjoy talking about books. What I don’t like is frantically paging through a book trying to prefabricate a semi-intelligent comment that will make it appear as though I’ve read the book, then spending so much energy trying to figure out where in the discussion to insert that comment that I am incapable of listening to anyone else. I spent more than enough time doing that in college.
I have found my book club.
Last Thursday marked the third meeting of the Seaport Book Club, sponsored by the South Street Seaport Museum, and my second attempt at attending. Back in January I paid $13.95 for David Cordingly’s book about pirates, “Under the Black Flag,” and the grinning skull on its spine has sat on my bookshelf deriding my profligacy ever since. I didn’t make it that time. Thursday evening all the way down on Water Street is a commitment.
This month’s selection – Joan Druett’s “She Captains: Heroines and Helliones of the Sea” – was hard to find. It wasn’t in stock at any Barnes & Nobles in Manhattan, and I’ll be honest, when I finally did get my hands on it at the library, it wasn’t very good. Didactic feminism and a bibliography half as long as the book itself is an inauspicious combo.
“Thus it can be seen that women were as distinguished for bold enterprise as their male equivalents,” Druett writes in the introduction, having given the reader a smattering of instances of she-mariners from various continents and centuries that did not make for a very comprehensive argument. “The rivers and beaches and seas were equal-opportunity spheres back then,” she concludes.
I dutifully slogged through a few chapters, and was rewarded with some entertaining snippets about cross dressing sailor “boys,” and female lighthouse keepers who were completely abashed by the media frenzy that followed a “heroic” rescue for what was, to them, a part of the job description. All in all, however, skimming seemed sufficient.
Perhaps not the best choice of book, but apparently it’s Women’s History Month. And that would make the other attendees more interesting anyway. Who would want to read this book at all, much less read it and then plod through it again with the group?
But then, as 6 p.m. approached, butterflies started fluttering ever so gently in my stomach. I had spent maybe an hour with the book, and I wasn’t allowed to take it out of the library, so all I had was a haphazard page of barely legible notes: passages I had copied in order to deride them in this column.
I was suddenly afraid I didn’t have much to contribute. They weren’t going to, like, call on me, were they?
I shot off an email to the book club coordinator, Leslie Shope, asking if she happened to have an extra copy of the book on hand (so I could pull my move if I had to. You know, the impromptu “close reading”).
Her response, though very friendly, made me slightly uncomfortable. She wrote: “I don’t have an extra copy, but you’re welcome to use mine. I’ve been taking notes all day, so I won’t need it too much.”
Taking notes all day! Oh no. This was a seriously academic gathering. That on top of the last e-mail she’s written in response to my RSVP – “It should be a small group, but good conversation” – made me decide I didn’t want to go anymore. (Small group equals greater obligation on each person to not be a dud.) I felt the scratchings of a sore throat, too.
Alas, it was Thursday night, and I had a Water Log to write. But I was in a bad mood, and that was not made better by the fact that I had dawdled to the point where there was no way to avoid being late.
What a pleasant surprise it was, then, when I barged into the Melville Gallery five minutes after six and (a) not one of the five people seated around the table gave me a look when I made a racket taking off my coat, and scarf, and hat, and gloves, (b) excluding Leslie, only one person had read the book, and those who had not unabashedly admitted it and (c) there were two plates of cookies.
Discussion ranged from related to the book (“Let’s hear some of those stories!” a woman exhorted Leslie) to somewhat relevant (“The Pirate Queen,” a play about Grace O’Malley, is opening on Broadway) to tangential (“I miss grubby old South Street”) to way off target (“What about this woman astro-nut?”).
Most, if not all of the six people who eventually showed up had come before, and there was an emerging easiness about the conversation that was as warm as the light on the gallery’s wood floors and beams.
“Next month,” said Leslie, wrapping up, “is ‘Moby Dick.’”
“That’s a big book!” shouts a white-haired man. “I’m not going to read that! I think I’m going to read Cliff’s Notes!”
I think I might, too.
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