Midway through 2024, I enthused about Casey Plett’s On Community which includes a discussion of how Plett often feels the term is too slippery but it’s hard to find a suitable replacement.

Sometimes I feel as though it means the opposite of what I want it to mean, or the opposite of what I thought it meant. But, here I am, using it too.

Perhaps it’s one of those “you know it when you see it” things?

I’m reminded of Arinze Ifeakandu’s talk of the writing process for the short story “Happy Is a Doing Word” (part of the Lauren Groff Best Short Stories of 2024 anthology):

“I’d returned to that yard, Baba Ali’s, that was our playground, and to that wonderful sense of community that was so palpable on our street, a truly beautiful thing to behold. I guess you could call it an ode of sorts. Everything else, of course, is imagined, especially the stories the street tells of its occupants.”

That’s not something I’ve found in real life, but in fiction, yes, and online, yes: this bookish community of ours. If you’re reading this, we’re in it. Thank you for reading and for exchanging your thoughts and ideas and recommendations here.

It’s been so long, now, that I can’t even remember when exactly I read this book with Bron’s Reading Orwell event in mind. As often happens with these events, I took the opportunity to read a book that I had steadily avoided theretofore: George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

It’s an historical examination of the lives of miners in Yorkshire and Lancashire, England in the early decades of the twentieth century.

I haven’t read Orwell since school days, so Bron’s event was an invitation to expand my experience with his prose. And having spent a lot of time in mining country in recent years, I have found that this book has come to mind frequently ever since. Just reading the local headlines can recall a single image from Orwell’s narrative.

“Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as reaction needs coal.”

A few years ago, I made a note of Cynan Jones’ Stillicide (2019) with Paula’s Dewithon in mind. It was a perfect March read: wet and bleak. It was perfectly chilling: the exact kind of meditative and lyrical kind of storytelling that gets under my skin and burrows into my psyche. I could hardly bring myself to write about it but, since then, I’ve found myself thinking about his writing, pondering the possibility of reading another of his slim works—Everything I Found on the Beach (2011) seems to be his longest, at 200 pages.

Investigating the options, I spotted his Bird, Blood, Snow which is about the same length and the eighth volume in a series called The New Maginogion. There are ten volumes in this series, and the only other writer who’s contributed, that I’ve read so far, is Tishani Doshi.

This is how reading projects get started, one book leads to ten; but it usually begins with a book I enjoy. Here, it’s a question of admiration.

For the 1937 (Simon) Club (Kaggsy), I wrote about reading a middle-grade novel by Marjorie Flack, Walter the Lazy Mouse (unexpectedly charming) and a Canadian classic novel by Morley Callaghan, More Joy in Heaven, but didn’t manage to finish Margery Sharp’s The Nutmeg Tree before that week ended.  Everyone else loves this novel, and now I see why. For all the Georgette Heyer fans out there, Julia provides just enough sass and she even reads Galsworthy.

“’But it takes a woman like you to understand.’
Julia nodded. She had often pondered this question of why wives didn’t understand when women like herself did; and the only conclusion she had reached was that to understand men—to realize the full value of their good streaks, while pardoning the bad—you had to know so many of them. Then when you came across one fellow who was a soak, for instance, you could nearly always remember another who soaked worse…But to know all that you had to have experience and wives as a rule hadn’t. They knew only one man, where women like Julia knew dozens; but then women like Julia rarely became wives.”

(They also hosted the 1970 Club, of course, but I finished reading Mavis on time.)

Ali started reading Margaret Drabble at the beginning of 2024, and I started wanting to join her straight away, but it actually took me several months to begin rereading. Here are her thoughts on Drabble’s debut.

When I first read A Summer Bird-Cage, I was keen on the relationship between the sisters as I’d also just discovered A.S. Byatt (her sister), so I was collecting both authors.

My Drabbles are mostly little Penguin pocketbooks with their 80s-orange-spines, cheap copies that don’t even have the book’s title or author on their pages.

My Byatts were tradesized paperbacks, in a matching orange, but still dominant on the shelf girth-wise, particularly with Possession in the mix.

So it interested me to think of Sarah as Margaret, Louise as Antonia.

This time around, I was more interested in the different choices available to the characters in the story, both men and women.

Does a podcast count as engaging with community?

Maybe not always. But Octavia’s Parables is exceptional.

When I first started listening, I hadn’t finished reading the book, and these women know The Parables inside and out. In the words of adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon: “we are intensely unveiling.”

Click through to their site, it's GORGEOUS

Even when they are consciously trying to avoid spoilers, there’s a sense of what’s to come. So, I finished reading on my own and, this year, finally returned to reread, in their company.

The first few episodes (there’s one for each chapter) aired just before the pandemic lockdown; it’s interesting to see how the conversation shifts once that experience is at the forefront of their minds, a different kind of urgency in the midst of that sense of unravelling which still feels relevant today.

(Here’s another take on Butler’s writing via Lithub inspired by the fact that Lauren’s journal begins in July 2024. Something else I love about their podcast is how each episode opens with discussion of other people’s ways of engaging with these works. They’re not in competition, accumulating subscribers, they’re celebrating and honouring, so there’s always room for more.)

I’ve enjoyed a lot of shared reading experiences in 2024, so this isn’t exhaustive. MARM, for instance, has been a cornerstone of my reading year for quite some time now, shared with fellow MARMers. Reading from the longlist for the UKLG Prize with Bill and the Carol Shields longlist with Rebecca and Laura. And, just the other day, I was sharing my progress on the 2024 Toronto Public Library reading challenge, a system that includes a hundred library branches and many thousands of other borrowers and participants. But sharing a reading experience with even only one other reading friend has its special charms.

Even if community is a slippery term, incomplete and disappointing, is sharing your thoughts on books part of being in community for you?

Or, do you do it for another reason, and that’s just a bonus?