Share the wealth
Got a book you can’t wait to discuss? Join or form a club
Have you just read a book you liked and want to share the good news?
You could post your comments on your Facebook page. You could text your friends.
Or if you want to talk at length and up close about the book, you could do what thousands do: Discuss it as a member of a book club. Book clubs have been a long- popular vehicle for book chats, with intended, or unintended, side benefits.
Sylvia Shurclilff organized a book club a year ago in her neighborhood near the University of New Mexico campus.
For Shurcliff, the club has produced benefits beyond reading and discussing books.
“It’s the spontaneous expression of my interest in community and neighborliness,” said Shurcliff, who with her husband, Arthur, moved to New Mexico from Massachusetts a few years ago.
“We’ve talked and gotten to know each other in the club, which I think is a continuing experience. … We’re becoming more than neighbors. We’re becoming friends.”
A book group, she said, is obliged to talk about books, but also, depending on the membership, it creates neighborhood bonds, which matter to her.
The unnamed club has about nine members who meet monthly in different neighbors’ homes.
The books the members read have generally been fiction. This month, they read Anne Hillerman’s bestseller “Spider Woman’s Daughter.”
The first book they discussed, in January 2015, was Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See.” It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Another book group whose members live all over the Albuquerque area — from Corrales to the East Mountains — is the Oldie but Goody Nurses Book Club.
Its 10 members are retired nurses who worked at Lovelace’s former Gibson hospital.
The idea for the club came to Helene Eckrich one morning about three years ago.
“After I retired, I was thinking, ‘Now what am I going to do after 44 years of being a nurse?’ Then at 4:30 a.m. one night I woke up and said, ‘I’ll start a book club.’ So at 4:30 in the morning I’m online and looking up how to start a book club,” Eckrich recalled.
She zeroed in on the website litlovers.com which gave her plenty of suggestions. Then Eckrich emailed 13 retired nurse-friends seeking interest in the club.
The group of 10 meets the third Wednesday of every month.
The book they’re discussing next is Susan Meissner’s “A Fall of Marigolds.”