A selection for the Sunday Smut Club at Booked on Main Street. Credit: Wendi Kromash
Along with the adorable Little Free Libraries popping up on every corner, and the online social forces of #BookTok and #Bookstagram, creative book clubs are making reading cool again.
By fostering a culture of book sharing and recommending (and sometimes bashing), physical books are making a comeback. Reading can be a social activity, not just a solitary one, and readers are also creating trends that don’t involve staring at a screen.
Not just bestsellers over cheese and crackers
Evanston has long been a hotspot for readers and writers, but the traditional gatherings for discussing the latest bestsellers have greatly evolved — there are now spell-casting societies, smut celebrations and dinner parties where the food matches whatever Julia Child was eating in France in the 1960s.
Booked on Main Street hosts everything from the Young Witches Spellcasting Society and Book Club for kids ages 8-12 who crave something more magical, to the Sunday Smut (some like to say “spicy”) Book Club.
“Spicy romance novels have had a huge resurgence,” said Abby Dan, co-owner of Booked. “We love reading them and talking about them, and so do many of our customers.”
Dan said she got a little bit emotional at their first book club meeting, where they literally ran out of chairs.
“We really are building community here, and continually welcoming new people is so important to us,” she said. “Realizing we’d exceeded our own expectations for attendance was really exciting. We have since, of course, bought more chairs!”
Jeff Garrett, a librarian at the Evanston Public Library and organizer of the History Book Club, said more than 20 people gathered to discuss a book on the history of the Levant — specifically three famous and ancient port cities: Smyrna, Beirut and Alexandria. Overall, the group has read around 40 books since it began in 2018. “We totally geek out at our discussions,” Garrett said.
‘As rich and deep’ as Julia Childs’ beef bourguignon
At Cooked at Booked, another Booked club, members try recipes from featured cookbooks and share the results potluck-style.
Meanwhile, Hive Center for the Book Arts has a different take on the “reading and eating” thing.
Co-founder Jaime Thome said she had always wondered what it would be like to actually taste the food writers describe so beautifully in their books, so she helped form the Eat Their Words book club, where every book comes with local chef Toni Camphouse’s custom food and wine pairings.
From left: Ann Hudson, Marcie Roman and Jamie Thome at Hive Center for the Book Arts, 840 Custer Ave. The center hosts the Eat Their Words book club.
Credit: Carrie Jackson
When the club read Julia Child’s My Life in France last December, Thome made an authentic boeuf bourguignon —”a painstaking and long process that elevates regular beef stew into something deeper and richer,” she explained.
But the real magic happened when members started pulling out old photos. One woman had pictures of her grandfather working in the same office as Julia Child. Another showed photos of herself actually dining with Child in 1970s Paris, and told a “raucous tale” of eating and drinking their way around the city.
“We all applauded. I had tears in my eyes,” Thome said. “It made the meal, and the evening’s discussion, as rich and deep as the bourguignon.”
Evanston Public Library groups
EPL isn’t sticking to dusty old book discussions, either. Their Mission Impossible Book Group spends entire years working through challenging authors and long, complex books like Ulysses and The Tale of Genji. What started as one small group in 2010 has grown into eight separate groups, with more than a hundred people signing up each year.
“Many participants said there’s no way they would have finished The Tale of Genji without the group,” said Heather Ross, the club’s organizer and EPL’s Literary Programming Librarian.
Some members get so into it they actually travel to the countries featured in their reading. During their Genji year, several people went to Japan. When they read Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, some headed to Egypt.
Evanston Public Library’s Mission Impossible Book Group spends years working through challenging reads. Credit: Sophie Gardiner
Lorena Neal, who started the library’s Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Group back in 2015, is a sci-fi and fantasy lover herself. She siad the group stayed virtual even after COVID because Zoom meetings turned out to be more convenient for everyone. They meet in person once a year in January for their “New Year, New Books” session, complete with snacks and recommendation sharing.
Neal said she noticed something funny: “Some of our most memorable discussions have come about when everyone absolutely hated the book we chose. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all good books are alike; each bad book is bad in its own way. There’s something cathartic about having other people to complain to when a book doesn’t live up to your expectations.”
Inclusivity
As reading becomes more of a social activity, literature fans are also demanding a wider range of genres and interest-based topics to include in their discussions, like Formula One romance, billionaire romance (because millionaires are so yesterday) and books featuring characters “who look like me.”
Readers are also seeking out new voices and more diverse content from indie authors, whose books are more readily available than they were in past decades.
Northshore Book Club, led by friends Tara Maher and Sheila Canmann, has members from Evanston to Highland Park and is designed for busy people. The club meets every other month and only selects books by local authors who are willing to attend meetings themselves.
“I love being able to ask questions about different aspects of a book and get the answers directly from the author,” said Evanston member Eileen Budde.
According to its MeetUp page, Evanston Vegan Book Club organizer David Martin leads discussions on “more obscure and difficult” books about animal ethics over plant-based dinners and limits groups to four people for deeper conversations (the group’s next meeting is at Blind Faith Café on Sept. 18 and will discuss Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust).
The Pump it Up! Book Club features books by members of the Chicago area’s Off Campus Writers Workshop, one of the nation’s oldest and most revered writing organizations. This club is open to the public and, for the second time in a row, has selected a book by an Evanston author: Esther Yin-Ling Spodek’s We Have Everything Before Us.
The Readability Book Club hosted by the Center for Independent Futures is designed for adults with disabilities, and Hive’s new Out North Book Group centers on LGBTQIA+ stories and community.
And if you’re into wine, The Wine Goddess Book Club plans to discuss Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast over drinks this month.
While this literary socializing might seem like just a fun trend, it’s also addressing people’s hunger for in-person connections in our increasingly digital world. Books, it turns out, are a pretty great way to bring people together.
“When people connect over a shared meal and story, it deepens community ties,” Thome said.
Whether it’s tackling challenging classics they might never finish alone, getting giddy over smut or bonding over shared meals inspired by literature, book clubs are proving to Evanstonians that stories do more than entertain.
Want to join the book fun? Check with the library, local bookstores or search MeetUp for groups that match your interests, or form your own and tell us about it at news@evanstonroundtable.
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