Book Club Fever

One group meets monthly to discuss one short story and one nonfiction article from The New Yorker. Another group’s reading Shakespeare out loud, reading and discussing one act per meeting. Yet another covers modern playwrights, now focusing on the plays of Samuel Beckett.
One group reads and discusses short stories. They meet in a variety of places, including people’s homes, clubhouses, party rooms and at Temple Shalom.

Brandeis University is a nonsectarian university, Wasser says, "and the groups are as well. Everyone is welcome."

Guests can attend one meeting for free. Then, if they want to join, they pay a $35 membership fee, as well as a $45 workshop fee. "It’s money well-spent," Wasser says. "I moved down here from New York. I was scared my cultural life wouldn’t be as good, but I feel my cultural life down here is very rich. I’ve never met a bunch of women so interesting and intelligent. Our discussions are very high-level."

NOVEL NIGHT
Eight years ago, Rebecca Totaro was looking for some balance in her literary life. As associate professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, she teaches Shakespeare and "Literature of the Plague," texts that are hundreds of years old. So she approached Barnes & Noble in Fort Myers and asked if she could lead a modern-novel discussion group. The store already had one, but the facilitators were leaving, and they needed someone new to lead the group. So Totaro stepped in.

As many as 30 people attend, depending upon the book being discussed. Totaro has a dozen regulars who attend every second Tuesday of the month, including a couple who, at home, read the selected book to each other out loud.

"It’s a fabulous group," Totaro says.

It’s also democratic; the group chooses what they’ll read for the next two or three months. Choices range from modern novels to classics such as Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.
Men also attend, so Totaro is careful to consider their literary tastes as well.

"I’m committed to not doing two chick books in a row, but we don’t do Tom Clancy," she says. Instead, they read books such as Saturday and E.L. Doctorow’s March.

While some book groups use the books as a jumping-off point to discuss their own lives, Totaro keeps the group firmly focused on the text. "We talk about the book and not their own lives," she says. "What’s going on with the novel? The agenda’s a purely intellectual one—just good conversation about the book."

The monthly Novel Night has created some cross-pollination. Her FGCU students sometimes attend, and conversely, some people from Novel Night have audited Totaro’s classes.

"It’s become a really rich community thing," Totaro says. "I couldn’t be more proud of it."

FIRST TIMES
Like Totaro, Laura Cifelli also inherited a book discussion group. A Lee County reference librarian for seven years, Cifelli leads a group that meets at noon every third Wednesday of the month at the Fort Myers-Lee County Public Library on Central Avenue.

The book club she inherited was originally called "Read a Good Movie Lately?" After a while, she changed it to Debut Novels, a discussion group based on first novels. Like any other book-lover, Cifelli, who also reviews books for Library Journal, loves to discover a promising new author.

"There are times when an author has only one book in them," Cifelli says, citing Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which was also a Fort Myers One Book One Community selection. "Or, it turns out to be the first book in a really excellent and prolific career."

She kicked off her Debut Novel discussion group with one of her favorites—The Eight, by Katherine Neville. Cifelli recalls that when the book was first published, she was a college student.
She skipped classes and "read it all day and into the night. I couldn’t put it down," she says. Neville has "a huge following that keeps waiting for each new book with bated breath. They’re magnificent. Clever and interesting. Captivating."

Covering The Eight garnered a new person in the book group, who drives in each month from Fort Myers Beach.

Cifelli says she tends to focus on historical fiction because her group likes that genre. But the librarian with the grape sorbet-colored hair doesn’t mind pushing the envelope with book selections either.

"I like to expose people to a different selection of writing or a different type of author," she says, explaining that the first book her group discussed this year was Anonymous Lawyer, a novel written in blog form.

"I thought, it’s time my group be exposed to this concept," she says. "Some e-mail, but some of them might not be up to speed on the concept of a Web blog."

"The end of the book is where we begin!" is the group’s motto. Cifelli prepares for each meeting as if she’s constructing a lesson plan. She brings maps, biographical information about the author, and information on other books that may have followed, leading the discussion with her trademark wry sense of humor.

Some of the books they discuss, she says, she may not have read for her personal reading pleasure.
"I read in three ways," Cifelli says. "For personal reading, reviewing for Library Journal, and I do this. It exposes me to a lot of different books, and I’m all the better for it."