Ever-Evolving Book Club

This time yesterday I was out late, drunk on sake and uncomfortably full of shrimp laksa, my arms draped around two friends as I stared up into a starless Manhattan sky. I was also at book club.

“Remember,” one of my fellow book clubbers Saba said, as she reached across the outdoor table to top up my wine glass, “When you used to prepare questions for these things?” Then she, Wendy, and Krista laughed uproariously (at me? with me? it was hard to remember!)

It’s true though – a lot has changed in the nearly two years since I began the Vicarious Reading Book Club. 

The first time the club met, there were a dozen of us, and we were all strangers. I read the book, prepared several pages worth of probing questions, and then practiced those questions so I wouldn’t have to embarrassingly refer to what I’d written mid-group. I rented a space on Breather, arrived early to “set up” (AKA pace about anxiously) and was so nervous that I nearly asked Emmett to attend for moral support.

Since then, we’ve progressed and regressed in equal measure. Our ranks have slimmed – there are just five of us who attend the club consistently, and we may be down to four after our sole male member moved to Vermont this Fall. For months last year, we met at my apartment while I was on bedrest, though we’ve now happily resumed our routine of eating at restaurants that correspond with the country we’re ‘traveling’ to. And recently, the percentage of time we dedicate to talking about the book has declined so precipitously that we’ve begun joking that next month’s pick should just be the back label of the wine bottle we’re drinking from. 

Things may be getting less literary, but they’re also getting more fun. In stark contrast to those formal first meetings when I stressed and prepped with a level of intensity I normally reserve for pitches and wedding speeches, the vibe of our recent meetups has relaxed into something almost cozy. We joke, we divulge, we sympathize, and when the book is bad, we now have more than enough real-friendship runway to enjoy the evening anyway. Which is important because, lately, our book choices haven’t been the best.

This July, we read Niviaq Korneliusen’s Last Night in Nuuk, a mercifully short meditation on addiction, abuse, desperation, and longing among the extremely young and extremely inebriated members of Greenland’s capital city. While bits of this novel were indeed novel – anecdotes about bouncers patting down parka hoods looking for hidden beers, conversations written from the perspective of a human heart (“’It’s nice to see you,’ I hear my heart say,”) and an entire chapter in the form of a text thread – the content of the story couldn’t live up to its stylistic tics. 

In August, we read Spiri Tsintizras’s Afternoons in Ithaka, a memoir of food and family that we chose because a) Wendy was going to Greece, so for once our travel needn’t be entirely vicarious, and, b) there’s very little Greek literature that isn’t The Odyssey or Zorba the Greek. It was 350 pages of low-stakes normalcy, a chronologically-told tale of a woman caught between American and Greek culture that felt like an extremely long journal entry sprinkled with some infuriating bonus sections about topics such as beekeeping and building a pizza oven. Don’t do it.

Finally, last night, we got together at Aux Epices in Chinatown to eat Malaysian food and discuss Yangsze Choo’s The Night Tiger, a book that, while imperfect, was good enough to drag all of us out of the post-Ithaka depression spiral that had kept the group apart since August. The Night Tiger tells the intertwining stories of Ren, an orphaned houseboy, and Ji Lin, a dressmaker’s apprentice – two children who are cosmically connected because they’ve both been named after Confucian virtues. Its magical realism threads didn’t come together finely enough for my taste, but it was still a propulsive read.

Next month, we plan to read and travel vicariously to Argentina, though we may just surrender to the temptation to review the back-sticker copy of a bottle of Malbec instead. Who knows what narrative twists and turns it may contain with its full-bodied, jammy character after all.