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Plumage From Pegasus: Book Clubbed
by Paul Di Filippo

“The Book Club Companion has a goal: to emulate one of the most
successful and evergreen how-to guides around. It would like to tell you
what to expect when you’re expecting to read a book.

“To that end, the author, Diana Loevy, puts on her party hat and pulls out all
the stops. She calls for everything from hole punchers (aren’t you keeping a
scrapbook?) to dog costumes. And she treats any literary experience as an
occasion for merriment. Gauche as it might be to bake Marie Antoinette
Cake in honor of the French Revolution, The Book Club Companion
steers the festive reader in that direction.”

—”Which Cheese Goes Best With Faulkner?” by Janet Maslin, The New
York Times, September 4, 2006.

****

It all started innocently enough, I suppose. No one could have
predicted at the beginning that our weekly book club meetings would result
in over a dozen ruined marriages, the disbanding of the PTA at Edmund
Wilson Middle School, several bank holdups, one full-blown international
crisis, three gender-reassignment operations, and at least four separate
stints at various drug-rehab clinics, not to mention an additional bushel
basket of similarly upsetting incidents, all of which stood out vividly in our
small town of Farblondjet, Nebraska.

But despite all the tumult and distress, I still fondly recall the
enthusiasm and high hopes we all had for our little literary salon at the start.

We convened that first Wednesday night at Sally Peterson’s house.
Sally had the nicest rumpus room, with a wet bar and pool table and lots of
comfy seating, and had been generous enough to volunteer her place.
Originally we were going to rotate our meetings among the houses of the
various members. But when Sarah Ozols protested that she’d never fit us
all into her studio apartment (over in the Latvian-dominated Brindleback
district, where no one trusted the street parking anyway), we all voted to
make Sally’s home our permanent meeting spot.

So there we were, fifteen women who more or less all knew each
other pretty well (we had tried unsuccessfully to interest a few of our
husbands and boyfriends in the group), holding Bloody Marys and
wondering how to begin.

“Has anyone ever been in a book club before?” asked Tina Feldman.
“I certainly haven’t done anything so creative myself.”

A chorus of “no’s” greeted her question.