Selected readings from the Old Lady Book Club

I read a lot. Two hours on the train every day, there's no excuse not to—I pity those who feel the need to jab at giant laptops in a can't-leave-work-at-work cry for help. Newspaper Luddites filling up on yesterday's analysis and the weirdos who stare straight ahead without listening to headphones or looking out the window are best left alone. And adults who play juvenile sensory-overload games on their iPhones, buying "lives" from Tim Cook every twenty minutes? These halfwits might as well come from Mars. Books, people. Portable, digestible books! It's not all The Brothers Karamazov (though that is on the shelf) and it's easy to embrace such lighter fare as macabre satire and sports-celebrity excess. Why not chuckle, wince or cry in front of commuters you partner with every morning and/or evening? You make nicknames for them and they probably have their own for you. Reading, at the very least, will pass the time. More likely it will give you something to contemplate… or to look up on Wikipedia afterward.

Nothing is so anticlimactic as finishing one book and starting another five minutes later. There are times when I'll lug a second book to and from Boston in order to avoid skimming outrageous Trump-related headlines on my phone for any stretch—the heart can only take so much. Often, lately, this filler consists of portions from one thousand plus pages of Edgar Allan Poe's collected Complete Tales and Poems so I can cleanse the palate with a handful (watch it with that word) of short stories—this has been the drill for about a year and a half and its concluding The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, plus a couple of essays about poetry that I may or may not read (though likely not the poems themselves), are all that remain. One hundred sixty pages of Poe's Greatest Hits, in chronological order? I'm glad you asked!

1. "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835)
2A. "The Psyche Zenobia" (a.k.a. "How to Write a Blackwood Article") (1838)
2B. "The Scythe of Time" (a.k.a. "A Predicament") (1838)
3. "The Man That Was Used Up" (1839)
4. "William Wilson" (1839)
5. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)
6. "A Descent Into the Maelström" (1841)
7. "The Gold-Bug" (1843)
8. "The Black Cat" (1843)
9. "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." (1844)
10. "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845)
11. "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)
12. "Hop-Frog (or: The Eight Chained Ourang-outangs)" (1849)
13. "X-ing a Paragrab" (1849)

A. had at least read "The Black Cat" and so discussion ensued over that and the similar buried-alive treatise "The Cask of Amontillado." So stimulating! The opposite of FOMO, to be able to engage another over something still fresh in your mind. After that though? Plans for us to see The Dark Tower petered out thanks to lukewarm reviews and a why-bother ninety-minute runtime. Maybe it will be on Netflix or Amazon Prime before long. Maybe I'll keep rereading the books instead.

This literary… malaise?… compelled me to seek out other readers—given the success of hack superstar David Baldacci, the world must be full of them. Full of something. I will join a book club! (How does one join a book club?) Searching the office intranet came up empty outside of bullshit for finance enthusiasts to pretend they understand. Not for me, more cries for help and all. Local Facebook groups also turned up nothing and maybe that's for the best, as I can see "book club ;-) bring muffins" fronting a vibrating gaggle of perverts. Pass.

Consulting my local library's website, then, the "Library Book Club" (a little on the nose) and the "New Book Group for Nonfiction Readers" (let's get a brand manager in here!) were listed, and since the nonfiction coordinator didn't respond to my email—hard to get a new endeavor off the ground that way, dude—it was the former by default. If the… aged… voice of the woman who answered the phone didn't paint a picture then her reaction to my interest surely did: "You'll be our first man!" Not only this year but in her sixteen years participating! Hoo boy.

Nonetheless I persisted. Last Tuesday was the initial get-together and I was one nervous motherfucker ascending the staircase to the library's second-floor meeting room. There, ten or so women with a mean age around seventy—my mother is seventy, but theirs is an old seventy—greeted me with "You must be Jarrod!" The energy was appreciated and awkward. Still I sat and introduced myself, explaining as above that it's a shame to finish a book and forget about it, before additional demographic arrivals totaled sixteen of X and one of Y. Many were kind, even lovely. Some couldn't be bothered—"What's this guy going to contribute, anyway?" Still preferred over the not-quite-hostile "Interloper!" expressions I read on a couple of faces. I see their point, though it's not as if any of them showed up in their nightgowns carrying boxes of chardonnay. Or that I was quoting Caddyshack. They just like to read. So I settled in, demonstrated attentiveness and only glanced at the clock about fifty times. It was right across from me.

Stacked in front of the others but not me—I missed the memo, which was probably an actual memo—were two or three books each to be nominated as the club's choices for the next twelve months. (Eleven, actually, since the community "one book" selection—Charlotte Gordon's pink-spined Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley—was already in place for October.) Many of these had flowers and shit on the covers alongside—shudder—female author's names. (The stairs are right there! Flee, and let gravity do the rest!) Call me old-fashioned but female fiction authors, in my experience, often write for a female audience. (Men are as guilty but, right or wrong, double standards usually work out in my favor.) Going around, everyone took turns holding up recommendations and I had to improvise mine, figuring others might be lost jumping right into the third The Dark Tower book—"Does anyone relate to Gasher? What motivates him?" Instead I suggested female author Lynne Olsen's Troublesome Young Men and Matthew Dicks's Something Missing, a quirky novel reminiscent of Monk that I enjoyed a few years ago. Surprise, everyone, for I have depth! The latter option filled a comedy void and so it's become our June assignment, with yours truly presenting—"If you're still with us," joked one. No kidding.

An hour later I'm pleased to report that the Ladies (as I'll address them here) came through for me: for every author named Angela there is a David, a Ben and a Graham, and that is a ratio to celebrate. Getting together with… my book club… one night a month through August? I can handle that, and maybe I'll even experience the satisfied closure I seek with each completed book. Worst case? I'll read a few I might not have otherwise and take my time planning a graceful (eventual? inevitable?) farewell. Something along the lines of: "It's not you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you… or you. It's me." Why must it always be the man's fault?