Thank you, everyone, for coming to our first/final book-club meeting. Apologies for how long it’s taken us to settle on a date, but in between work, kids, and the pretense of joining adult recreational sports leagues, it seems that we all have incredibly busy schedules. After months of deliberation and hundreds of messages in the group chat, the third Tuesday of the month, from 4:27 P.M. to 5:36 P.M. (non-gibbous moon), seems to be the only time that works for everyone.
Despite the hours of our lives lost to logistical planning, I’m so glad we’re doing this book club and strengthening our bonds as friends by convening monthly to enrich our minds. Books are so great. They’re like watching a movie with subtitles, except Billie Eilish doesn’t record an original song for them, and there are no hot people to look at, unless you want to go through the effort of imagining them in your brain.
I’m particularly excited for us to discuss this month’s inaugural/terminal book. A hot person who is in movies—which, as we have established, are like books that went to the gym and got buff—recommended this book, and I implicitly trust anyone in the public eye with her own tequila brand! Plus, the book has a little silver badge on it, so you know we’re about to dig into a literary prize hog.
I feel like I’ve been talking a lot. Does anyone want to jump in and share what they thought of this month’s read, or enumerate its various themes? No? O.K., I’ll be honest. I’ve had a pretty busy month—what with trying to find a new coffee table on Facebook Marketplace and interminably reckoning with my own mortality—and did not get a chance to read the book, so maybe I shouldn’t be the one to lead the discussion. Maybe someone else who read the book could—
Oh, O.K. None of us read the book? Well, at least we’re all on the same page! Ha-ha, book-club humor. I’m sure we can cobble together some sort of discussion. Danielle told me that she skimmed the Wikipedia page before falling down a rabbit hole of unsolved air-traffic accidents. And Sasha listened to an audio recording of an entirely different book, one that was actually less a story and more a series of loosely related smut scenes featuring a tortured but deeply empathetic tatted-up centaur with the stamina of a stallion and the emotional intelligence of a man. It was written by a middle-aged woman? Interesting. And, Janine . . . you thought this was just a brunch? Read the group chat for once, Janine! Though clearly reading isn’t one of our strong suits, and, now that you mention brunch, there is a frittata place I’ve been wanting to try.
No, wait. I think we’re getting off topic here, because the topic is books. Books are awesome. They’re like scrolling mindlessly on your phone, except instead of spending two hours in a dissociative state you keep reading the same sentence over and over again because you actually have to pay attention to the words or you’ll forget what’s happening. Maybe we should table this discussion for now, and try again next month, when we’ll inevitably make a few superficial attempts at rescheduling before allowing our book club to die a quiet death, and redirecting the group chat to more realistic goals, like finally planning that girls’ trip to Cancún. ♦
