In Praise of Book Clubs

Oct 022018
 

Dear friends: I love meeting readers. One of the best ways to do that is through book clubs. I’ve appeared before several since the release of The Former Assassin. I’ve interacted with members in person or via Skype. The experience keeps me on my toes; it’s also great fun.

I want to celebrate book clubs this month in several ways. I’ve interviewed a good friend who is a dedicated clubber. Her curiosity and enthusiasm for reading are contagious. She loves to read. In other words, she is an author’s dream!

I’m also running a month-long book club special that include deep discounts on ten or more print orders along with a free Skype or (if possible) in person appearance (“meet the author”) as well as an Amazon Kindle giveaway beginning October 14th.

Meanwhile, enjoy the interview with book clubber extraordinaire Sue Phillips.

Sue Phillips1. How did you become a book clubber?
I’ve always loved reading. My mom, a voracious reader, always said that one could never be truly lonely if there was a book to read (she also always said if you could read, you could cook, but that one hasn’t always worked for me!) I’ve moved around a lot (New York, Denver, San Francisco Bay Area, Missouri, now back on the East Coast), and book clubs have always helped me meet people and get involved in a new area.

When we first moved to Princeton, NJ, we didn’t know anyone. Learning that there was not a book club I could join in our community, I decided to start one. I put it in our Community newsletter, selected The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah and 12 people showed up! We’ve been meeting for almost three years and not only has the group filled my need for book discussions, it’s given me friendships and a sense of belonging.

2. Tell us about your first club.
It began with a group of friends who started reading the same books and thought, why not get together to discuss them? It was part social, part discussion and always fun! Over the years, members left, new members joined, but being a part of that group always remained a constant.

3. What books did you read in that first club?
I remember The Birth Order Book by Dr. Kevin Leman (1998 Baker Publishing Group), where the discussion was much more of a personal nature to The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (2001, Scribner), where we wore tiaras and drank champagne—how courtly.

4. What do you get out of book clubs?
I love getting exposed to different authors and different genres of books. It takes me out of my comfort zone. It has also made me more aware of how many good books there are out there and please give me enough time to read them!

5. What’s the most interesting observation you’ve made about belonging to book clubs?
I’m always amazed when someone has a totally different perspective on a book. Usually it will be varying degrees of like/love or dislike; but sometimes someone comes up with a totally different way of looking at a character or a theme, and there’s an epiphany! Wow! I may never think or look at “that” the same way again! That to me is fascinating.

6. Do you ever get to meet the author?
Besides the wonderful Nikki Stern, who enthralled our book club, there were 2 writers who visited a book club I was in several years ago. One gave us the historical background of the area we were living in, the other the beginning steps on how to get published. Very different but also interesting.

7. Does your book club have a designated discussion leader?
Not really. I am the one that usually does all the correspondence: reminder of meetings, the book selections we have made, getting the meeting started, etc. but I like to defer to whoever recommended the book to start the discussion.

8. Do you (or does your leader) predetermine discussion themes or are your discussions more free-wheeling?
Our discussions are much more free-wheeling but it depends on the book. When this book club first started, we relied more on Book Club discussion questions and reviews, but now we are comfortable just discussing the book. We also try to balance heavy themed books with lighter ones. While gives us a nice balance, it also means that some meetings can get very intense while others are lighter and a bit more social.

9. Who would you recommend join a book club?
I would recommend a book club to anyone who wants to broaden their interests and is open to new things. Reading is wonderful, but being able to share your thoughts with others, enriches the experience. Discussing ideas and characters, listening to different perspectives, looking at topics and situations from someone else’s viewpoint, these all make me feel more connected.

(Brain) Food for Thought

Jun 192018
 

I am back in physical therapy for the stubborn left shoulder that won’t fully heal following surgery. My therapist has given me a series of targeted exercises. Some are repeats of those I did after surgery last year; some are new. All will go into a folder marked “shoulder,” which sits within a larger folder called “PT.” In there are also maneuvers for hip, ankle, and lower back. These are presented in drawings, photographs, and instructions for at least thirty distinct exercises.

cluttered brainI don’t take this folder to the gym, of course. Instead, I’ve tried to memorize every one of these, with limited success. After all, I also need to remember to do them every day–and to sit up, stand up, lift my head up, roll my shoulders back, pick up my feet—in short, apply my brain to the conscious maintenance of a body challenged by the passing of time.

My brain has other things to do as well: rewrite the first half of my new novel by the end of the month, walk and feed my dog, take out the garbage, plug in and check on the basement dehumidifier, pick up a prescription, arrange for a ride to the airport, prepare to present in front of a book club, take my vitamins. This while I’m trying to remember where I put my iPad or what I went upstairs to fetch.

I have an online calendar for the important appointments that the Cloud shares with my devices. I also make lists. If I start more than one, something I almost always do, I must remember to blend the two and compare them with whatever I’ve written online. I suppose I could have Alexa or Siri or Gaga (my name for Google Assistant) remind me but I don’t yet trust technology to make distinctions between “buy fence for back garden” and “buy plastic border for front garden.”

It’s a lot to ask of an aging intelligence—or is it?

Research about the older brain has been a roller coaster ride of good and bad news for at brain cellsleast forty years, according to an article in Newsweek that summarized more recent findings. In September of 2016, Harvard Health Publishing wrote that although we naturally lose brain cells as we age, we can grow new ones. Then, in March of this year, research published in the journal Nature indicated scientists could find no new neurons in adult brains. The next month, Cell Stem Cell published a study showing that we can potentially continue to make neurons in the hippo-campus until we’re almost eighty. The factors include the aforementioned exercise, a healthy lifestyle, enriched environment, and social interactions.

As to the last, the National Institute on Aging says “Social relationships are consistently associated with bio-markers of health.” They are also the hardest to maintain, owing to the natural isolation seniors encounter. Absent meaningful work and/or close family, struggling with mobility issues and grappling with feelings of purposelessness and irrelevance, older people find it challenging to build or keep relationships.

I’ve got the exercise and healthy lifestyle down, thanks to a dog and a bike. I consider books and engagement with arts and politics to enrich my environment, not to mention the lovely home I’m fortunate enough to own. Social interactions are trickier. I’m a widow engaged primarily in solo endeavors like writing, which means I’m constantly out of practice. While I am expressive and articulate on paper and, I hope, online, I’m far more introverted than most people realize.

Without a doubt, though, socialization is probably the single most effective antidote to friend in kicklinepain and depression I’ve ever encountered. I recently spent two days in the company of a group of wonderful women I first met online. I walked miles and forgot about my aching shoulder, back, hip, etc. We ate and drank and laughed and hugged. I’m still riding the afterglow.

What this suggests is I have even more to add to my to-do list. Somewhere between  “schedule doctor” and “buy paper towels” and “finish chapter three,” I need to remind myself to text or email or message or call a friend and make a plan. It’s not just about maintaining friendships. It’s about strengthening your brain.

Not All Grief is Silent

Mar 082018
 

Parkland shooting teen survivorsYou see them after every tragedy: the husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, friends, and colleagues who have lived through what is an unimaginable event for most people. Somehow, instead of hiding away, they are out front, dealing with the inevitable mash of cameras, microphones, journalists, bloggers, well-wishers, and hangers-on. To add to their suffering, they must deal with entitled opinionistas, naysayers, trolls, and the genuinely ugly folks who feel compelled to issue threats via social media.

Yet they persevere, these physically and psychically injured people. Despite pain, loss, and soul-crushing grief that would lay most people low, they’ve appeared in public shortly after their experiences. They ask for understanding. More often than not, they advocate for change. A few might insist on assigning blame; far more insist on accountability.

Recently, a group of teenagers at Florida’s Parkland High School escaped death by yet another mass shooting. Now, some of them are calling on legislators to control, regulate, or ban the kinds of weapons favored by shooters at malls, rock concerts, and schools. These weapons–semi-automatic, self-loading, or whatever we choose to call them–are designed to inflict maximum damage in a minimum amount of time and they’ve been easy to procure by people who are crazy or just angry.

While the teens are widely supported, they’ve also encountered plenty of social media haters quick to accuse them of being either naïve children dazzled by the attention or opportunistic spot-light seekers backed by calculating adults. Some suggest that activism in the wake of tragedy is inappropriate. There are even those who suspect—or pretend to suspect—these poised and focused teens are paid actors.

How familiar that all sounds.

My husband died on 9/11. I spent a little time thrashing around my empty house. Social media didn’t really exist in 2001, just a few AOL chat rooms where eager participants engaged in conspiracy theories. When the journalists first called, I spoke about my husband. It helped, a little, but I remained at home and that was not a good place for me to be. My first steps at advocacy involved getting help for the families and also, to be honest, trying to articulate the painful peculiarity of our position: our grief was personal but also shared. We were in the public eye, like it or not. My voice, which had literally disappeared after my husband’s death, began to return. My will to live followed, although it returned far more slowly than I let on.

Finally, I screwed up the courage to express myself about the fallout from the attacks: a war with Iraq (a country that produced none of the hijackers), a deep division about how to treat Muslim-Americans, the ways in which 9/11, like so many tragedies before and since, became a shield for bad policy-making and fodder for the haters. Some of what I said put me at odds with other family members, or with talking heads, particularly on Fox News. The push-back hurt. I didn’t exactly shrug it off, but I didn’t stop, either.

The students who’ve chosen to be front and center impress me. I get why they’re speaking out. Because they’ve identified a single, absolutely relevant issue around which they can unite. Because they’re articulate, in the way smart, engaged teens can be. Because, yes, they want to make sense of an event that upended their young lives and ended the lives of their friends. Because the grief is too strong to lay quietly within them. They’re grieving, yes, but in their grief, they’ve become hyper-attuned to anyone who is trying to tell them how they should behave or how they should feel.

I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices. They push back against the critical, envious outsiders and against those who try to politicize their actions, as if safety and common sense were simply one side of an argument. No, they insist, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t call us children and still fail to protect us. You can’t call us opportunists and then fail to listen to what we say. You can’t take our grief, our pain, and our resolve and use it to further your own agenda. We call that b.s.

I call it hope.

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