Why We Still Read Together: The Joy of Book Clubs

Episode Transcript

[Sound of people gathering at Dyker]

Rita Leave it, Anna, I'll take care of the door, don't worry...  Before we bother the people. 

Donna You don't realize it. You start laughing, and then they have to close the door on us. 

Adwoa Adusei In the back room of Dyker Library, eight women, all retirement age, gathered around a table. Many of them have been coming to this library for decades. They were drawn here originally not for the books that the library offers…  but for the community. Here’s Rita.

Rita I lost my husband. I was little at wit's end and lonely. And I thought, well, let me come to the library. And I started with the choir, the group of singers. And then we had a women's group. Anna was one of the first people with me.

Anna Even though I’m the youngest. 

[Laughter]

Fritzi Bodenheimer Dyker Library serves the Southern Brooklyn neighborhoods of Dyker Heights and Bensonhurst, neighborhoods with large populations of Italian-Americans and Chinese-Americans, as well as a growing Russian-speaking community. And another thing you should know about the library is that they are known within BPL for an incredible amount of programming.

Adwoa Adusei That’s right. We produced an episode last year about the popular Dyker Singers group, which have been singing at the library for the past decade. There’s also a mahjong group, chair yoga, teen time, story time … but producer Virginia visited the branch that day to talk about a much more basic library offering: the book club. 

Donna We go out for a pizza, we hang out together, just a bunch of friends, and it gives you something to look forward to. You know, I mean, once you retire, you’re home all the time. So at least that's where we laugh.

Fritzi Bodenheimer As you might expect, many of the book club members are huge readers. They have fond memories of getting books from parents as kids. But a good number of the book club members don’t identify as readers, like Anna, one of the most senior members of the group. She grew up loving stories, but not really reading books…

Anna My Aunt Katie used to tell her stories, book stories, but it was in Italian, and we were all sitting on the floor. And we enjoyed that because we were like the cousins and the siblings, we were all listening to the Italian stories. This was in the Bronx. I didn't know what the library was. My mom didn't bring us to the library, so I really don't read that much.

Virginia So what brings you to the book club? 

Anna The companionship. You know, getting together with people. You stay in the house, you go a little too-too. [Laughter]

Fritzi Bodenheimer The book club meets once a month, and usually has between 20 and 25 attendees, which is an impressive turnout for a library book club. And it also has a long history. It’s been going for 12 years, in large part because of the connections between members. Here’s book club member Mary Jane.

Mary Jane Believe it or not, I moved to Staten Island. I come back here now to be part of the book club. There's a big variance of age. I'm one of the older ones, but we have Svetlana, who's a young mother. She finds the time. 

Rita We get Carmen. She's a young woman 

Mary Jane She can't be more than 20, 25. And it’s like Rita said. I’ll talk to Rita and say, I don't know, I didn't really care for that book, but I can't wait to go to the club to see how somebody else interpreted the book, and see how somebody else read it and it's good. It leaves yourself open to others. 

Adwoa Adusei That last point Mary Jane mentioned seemed important to many of the women there. With political and social tensions high these days, it can feel like there are few places to disagree openly with each other. A book club is one of those places.

Rita Listen, we're not robots. Everybody has their own thoughts. And you’d be surprised sometimes, even if you disagree with someone, you do see their point. You know, it's not good to always everybody think the same. It's good to hear another point of view. 

Adwoa Adusei As you get older, it can be hard to stay social and connected. But through things like book clubs, these women are managing to build strong relationships. Here’s Rita again.

Rita I made such good friends here. I mean, they'll be my friends for life.

Mary Jane Don’t push it.

[Laughter]

Rita No, it’s the truth. You know it's true. Mary Jane, you feel the same. You know you do. My sons wanted me to leave Brooklyn, one lives in Florida, one lives in Jersey, because I'm alone now. But I won't leave because I have this nice group and they’re company and I enjoy them. And that's really what's very important. 

Donna And we have the library to thank for it. 

Rita Exactly. 

Adwoa Adusei Today on Borrowed: we’re going back to the basics with a tour around our borough’s many book clubs. I’m Adwoa Adusei.

Fritzi Bodenheimer And I’m Fritzi Bodenheimer. You’re Listening to Borrowed: stories that start at the library.

[Theme music]

Adwoa Adusei It may or may not surprise you to learn that we librarians at Brooklyn Public Library have our own book club. Because, believe it or not, librarians don’t sit at the reference desk reading books all day! We actually have very little time to read for our jobs. That’s what motivated Emma Carbone, a young adult librarian at Central Library, to start the staff book club.

Emma Carbone Thinking about that and how valuable it is to be able to talk about different books, I decided to start “The Cover Is Blue” in I think 2019. 

Fritzi Bodenheimer You’re going to have to explain the name of the book club to me… “The Cover is Blue”?

Adwoa Adusei It’s actually a library school in-joke! Here’s how Emma puts it.

Emma Carbone There's a joke in library science and reader's advisory that a lot of people will come in and they'll be like, “I don't remember the title. It was blue on the cover and there was a cat on it.” And then after you got through the reference interview, it often ends up being that it was a red book with a dog on the cover.

Adwoa Adusei So, if you ever see cheeky library displays with books that all have blue covers … now you’re in on the joke! 

Fritzi Bodenheimer Noted! So what kind of books do staff read in the book club? 

Adwoa Adusei It’s a huge range, and that’s really on purpose. Here’s Johanna Lewis, a school outreach librarian in the book club. 

Johanna Lewis I work with K through 12. And what is really fantastic about this book club is that there are months that we will read a children's book and an adult book, or a children's book and a book and two YA books. So it keeps me reading new things, and it keeps me on top of what's coming out. 

Adwoa Adusei But also, we just love to talk about books! 

Maria McGrath I joined because if there's a book club, if there's a chance to discuss books, I'm there. 

Fritzi Bodenheimer Maria McGrath is also a school outreach librarian. Beyond her participation in the staff book club, she’s in a long-running book club with friends outside of work.

Maria McGrath I was just doing math because the book club that I'm in, I joined in 1997.

Adwoa Adusei Woah, that’s 27 years! That might be the longest-running book club I’ve heard of. 

Fritzi Bodenheimer Right? Taylor Hunsberger, a children’s librarian at East Flatbush, joined a book club when she moved to New York a couple of years ago.

Taylor Hunsberger I got invited by a friend, we had, like, met on Bookstagram in 2020. And I actually had never met this friend in person until we met up for book club.  

Fritzi Bodenheimer And it’s a pretty niche book club. 

Taylor Hunsberger … called the “Mad Women Book Club.” All of the books are about mad women and not necessarily like, you know, mentally ill women, but like angry women, particularly focusing on women and queer authors in general. 

Adwoa Adusei Louisa Lebwhol, a librarian at DeKalb Library, is in another hyper-specific book club.

Louisa Lebwhol So my book club that I was in this year was reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro. And yeah, I mean it was a great experience, I think, for this book in particular because it's like … long. 

Adwoa Adusei Long is maybe an understatement. The Power Broker is Robert Caro’s masterpiece about  the controversial New York icon Robert Moses. And it’s 1200 pages long! This year happens to be the 50th anniversary of its publication, so there’s a whole community of New Yorkers reading it this year. 

Louisa Lebwhol And it's actually very, very engaging and very readable. But it is intimidating just because it's big. It was just nice to have accountability and to have people to talk to about it.

Adwoa Adusei Louisa managed to finish the book … which is a badge of honor for New Yorkers.

Louisa Lebwhol Well, there is a mug… So, The New York Historical Society just acquired Robert Caro's papers. And so they have an exhibit up and in the gift shop there, they have a mug that says, like, “I finished The Power Broker.” So I'm kind of waiting for someone to buy that for me. But it hasn't happened yet.

Adwoa Adusei And because we can’t be left out of the fun, BPL’s Macon branch is actually going to host a Power Broker reading club starting in December! We’ll put a link to that event in our show notes.

Fritzi Bodenheimer When it comes to creating book clubs for patrons… that can be a little harder. Especially after the pandemic, library workers have been trying to figure out how to let people know about the incredible catalog of books we offer, and bring them back into the library. So, our branches are getting creative.

Juli Meinz I visited Greenpoint and they were playing around with this idea where people bring their own book and then have, like, kind of pitch to other people about what books that they should read. 

Fritzi Bodenheimer This is Juli Meinz. She’s BPL’s new reader services coordinator. Her whole job is to help patrons connect with books again. And she’s got a lot of ideas.

Juli Meinz Yes, at Midwood we were working on a passive book discussion display. So basically, we just created a question based on The Twilight Garden by Sara Nisha Adams, that was kind of the book of choice. And then the question was sort of, like, vague enough that anyone could answer it, but it sort of pressed you to explore the book. 

Adwoa Adusei There’s so much variety when it comes to the kinds of reading events and groups, and that’s because every neighborhood has a unique community of people.  A standard, in-person book club where everyone reads the same thing, like the book club at Dyker Library … doesn't work for everyone. It turns out that getting more specific helps! Like the event at Paerdegat Library that Juli was helping to organize that day.

Juli Meinz Here, for example, we have a really strong Haitian community. We're right by, we're in Little Haiti right now and we have an English conversation group at this branch that is really interested in programming that was a little more fun and less like homework. And that's how we came up with this book bingo campaign. 

Arianne Bienvenu The patrons are going to select which language they are able to read, which is Haitian Creole or French or English.

Adwoa Adusei Arianne Bienvenu is the adult librarian at Paerdegat Library. And she created the book bingo campaign. She showed Virginia the bingo card.

Arianne Bienvenu They're going to have to fill three squares going in one column, whether it be up or down or left to right. 

Virginia Marshall Can you read some of them out?

Arianne Bienvenu “Attend Haitian Read-In,” “About Caribbean History,” and “Written in Creole.”

Adwoa Adusei That day, patrons could check off the bingo square for “Attending a Haitian Heritage Event.” Patrons were invited to bring their own books with Haitian-American themes or stories and chat with fellow patrons about it in the meeting room. So, basically a book club where everyone’s reading something different.

Fritzi Bodenheimer Arianne said that she came up with the idea after Haitian Flag Day, when she put together a cultural event at the branch.

Arianne Bienvenu I'm Haitian myself, so I wanted to highlight the patrons that came to Paerdegat who are mostly of Haitian descent. And we had food and we had music and we had flags and we had the book display filled with Haitian authors.

Virginia Marshall And did you see people checking out your books? 

Arianne Bienvenu Oh my goodness, did I see them? People took books out, people read the books. People talked to me about the books. So, it's really fulfilling seeing the book display being in use. Because it's one thing to be like, okay, this matters, and you put it out there and that's fine, but seeing people interact with it is really warming.

Fritzi Bodenheimer Hosting book clubs in languages other than English is something many staff are trying to build up in branches. There are a good number of bilingual storytimes for kids, but it can be hard to find enough copies of a foreign language adult book. We’re trying, though! There’s currently a Russian language book club at Dyker Library, and a Chinese comics reading program at Homecrest Library.

Adwoa Adusei And if you don’t see something that you want, whether it’s a book in a foreign language or a book club about a specific reading interest, let us know! Talk to the librarian at your local branch. We are very happy to help you get back to reading. 

[Music fading into sound of people talking at a book club]

Adwoa Adusei Okay, for the last stop on our book club tour, we’re going to Park Slope Library, where for the last couple of months, I’ve hosted a book club that has existed for the last two years. 

April I started coming to this book club pretty recently after I moved to New York after college. And I had moved here for my job, but it went fully remote. So I was really struggling to figure out how to meet pretty much anybody.

Adwoa Adusei This is April, one of the longest members of the book club, which is called “Adulting Is Hard.”

Fritzi Bodenheimer That’s a great title!

Adwoa Adusei Thank you! We read graphic novels and comics in the club, and it came together in 2022 as we were trying to bring patrons back to the library after the pandemic. It can be hard to engage the twenty and thirty-something demographic, folks who are on the move, interacting with the library more on their phones than in person. So the name of the book club was fairly playful.

 Fritzi Bodenheimer Did it work to draw people in?

Adwoa Adusei I think so! Here’s Shoshi, another regular member of the club. She lives in upper Manhattan and commuted all the way to Park Slope Library on a recent Saturday afternoon.

Shoshi As an adult, it's hard to make friends and it's really beautiful to come to a space, a shared space to bond over common interests, meet really like minded people, feel welcome and feel community and then say, “Bye, I'll see you next time.” Just getting to connect over something like graphic novels, especially, where you can still have a discourse about character development plot. But you can also talk about different design styles. 

Adwoa Adusei Each month,we pick 4 to 6 graphic novels or comics. We’ve had themes on family, on city living, adolescence and obviously on the ups and downs of adulthood. Attendance fluctuates each month, but we have some steady regulars, and there are always people who are just discovering the book club … like Matt, who was there for the first time.

Matt I regularly come to this library to actually draw a graphic novel. So, I saw on the shelf that there was a meeting about this. I’m actually really excited. I decided to come to this a week ago and read all the books as quick as I could. 

Adwoa Adusei I was impressed he read the books so quickly, but that’s definitely not a requirement … 

Ani My name is Ani. I'm a Park Slope local. I'm still pretty novice, I've only been a couple of months. The last few months, due to “adulting,” I haven't really done the reading, but I still enjoy listening to everyone's opinions and like hearing everyone's different tastes. But, you know, I'm going to try to do the readings this month if I can. [Laughter]

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei Over the past two years, I’ve seen book club members support each other in real-life ways, sharing resources and encouragement in the parts of our lives that are not about books and reading... you know, all that adult stuff. 

Fritzi Bodenheimer And listeners, if you’re feeling that it’s time to take the plunge and join a book club, we’ll include links to some of our book clubs across the borough, because there are so many we couldn’t feature! There’s a library book club that meets at a bar in Marine Park, a Sci-Fi book club in Clinton Hill, and LGBTQ+ book club in Brooklyn Heights, and tons of anime clubs for teens. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next month with more stories that start at the library.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library. This episode was hosted by Fritzi Bodenheimer and me, Adwoa Adusei. Virginia Marshall wrote and produced the episode. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes at BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.   

Fritzi Bodenheimer Brooklyn Public Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] donate.   

Adwoa Adusei Our Borrowed team is made up of Virginia Marshall, Ali Post, Fritzi Bodenheimer, Robin Lester Kenton, Damaris Olivo, and me, Adwoa Adusei. Jennifer Proffitt and Ashley Gill run our social media. Our music composer is Billy Libby. Meryl Friedman designed our logo. Until next time, keep reading.