I feel sorry for people who don't like to read. I also feel sorry for people who can't read, but that's a whole different story. I can't image going through life and only reading when it's absolutely necessary for either my job or my health.
Yet I know many people who fit this category. They glean their information from 30-second television bytes or from listening to the loud-mouthed crackpots who call in to sports talk radio shows.
I especially feel sorry for them when book club week comes around.
Once a month I get to spend time with a group of women who also love to read. Some of us are voracious readers, some manage just the one monthly book. What we all have in common is a respect for the written word and each other's opinions.
Like many book clubs we're a diverse group of people, and while most of us work, one of us is lucky enough to be retired and able to travel frequently. We have many interests and very different affiliations.
Over the past year, we've read some spectacularly diverse books, some much more memorable than others. So far our choices have been about half and half fiction and non-fiction. We've scaled the highs and lows of literature. And although we never intended it to be so, about two-thirds of our books have Canadian authors.
What I've learned from these books has been both profound and trivial to the nth degree.
For instance, I learned a great deal about Alzheimer's disease from reading a very moving and at the same time disturbing book, Still Alice by Lisa Genova. In this book a youngish professional woman becomes a victim of this dreaded disease. For anyone who has seen a family member or friend go through the trials of dementia, this book is particularly poignant. Many times while reading it I thought of my mom and the way this vile illness stole her essence.
On the trivial side of the equation, the club agreed that, while Barbara Walters book Audition was jam-packed with a lifetime of current events, it was also information overload at times. Who really cared if she was wearing a pink dress when she met Sadat for the first time? Not I.
Interestingly, one of the books that caused the most controversy in our group was The Shack by William P. Young. Because I don't want to spoil the story for anyone who hasn't read the book, suffice it to say the faith content of the book was off-putting to some of our club members.
This month's selection is the amazing book by Canadian author Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes. There are not enough superlatives in the English language to tell you how I feel about this marvellous book. I was absolutely thrilled to find out Hill is the first author to confirm attendance at the 2010 Festival of the Written Arts. I can hardly wait.
I've come to the conclusion there are too many books and not nearly enough time. I can only hope that heaven has a reading room.
