The World's Smallest Book Club

Mistah and I both love to read.

I read mostly contemporary fiction; he reads lots of non-fiction and natural history. Occasionally we recommend books to eachother -- he recently read Colum McCann's As The Great World Spins; he turned me on to Ivan Doig  -- but we almost never read the same book at the same time . . . with the highly dramatic exception of Lonesome Dove, which we read at the same time, years ago, traveling through California. We had identical 25¢ mass market paperback copies; he started his, I joined in and blew by him, he finished soon after.

We both loved it.

Anyway, twelve years later we thought it would be fun to read the same book at the same time and then, you know, talk about it.

A Book Club! For two!

There are many considerations to take into account when planning the inaugural meeting of a book club -- world's smallest or not.

The Book.
Our book choice, in honor of Spring and next week's Opening Day, was The Natural, by Bernard Malamud.

Good choice, right?

Ancillary material can be helpful, too.

The Food.
It is vitally important, hugely crucial, to have good snacks for book club meetings. Reading is, after all, hungry work.

 For our inaugural meeting, we chose chili . . .

. . . with all the accouterment . . . 

. . . preceded by snacks.

And please, please, don't forget the wine.

The Atmosphere.

For book club -- world's smallest or not -- it's very helpful and exciting to create a relevant Display-of-the-Day . . .

 . . . or two.

Display-of-the-Days are very fun and festive. And Mistah is a Display-of-the-Day machine.

And then . . .

Time to Have At It.

Further Activities.
We happen to have chosen a book that -- 32 years after it was written -- was made into a movie. So we did what any self-respecting book club -- world's smallest or not -- would do.

We borrowed the movie from the library . . .

. . . and bought accompanying peanuts and, um, Crunch 'n Munch. Sigh. I couldn't find Cracker Jacks anywhere.

Sadly, The Natural was made into a really bad, really cheesy, really awful, really Hollywood-ized movie. Like, Hollywood-ized to the point where the entire ending -- the entire theme of the book, really -- is turned completely upside down and exactly opposite.

Sigh.

Still, it was a perfect, brilliant, awesome, inaugural meeting of the World's Smallest Book Club.

Oh, and one last cautionary note to those eager to start books clubs of their own, world's largest or no:

It's a really bad idea to eat shelled peanuts indoors.