My reading life is looking up! Last night I went to a public book club. A local book shop, Blacksburg Books, hosted it at nearby Moon Hollow Brewing, which I’ve been wanting to go to anyway, and this gave me a perfect excuse. When I walked into the cozy, wood-floored brewery, I saw several 4-top and 6-top tables with “Reserved for book club” signs on them, and lots of people seated at them with colorful beers in pretty glassware — pale citrines, foamy apricots, rich chocolate browns — each with a copy of The Bluest Eye on the table next to them.

I bought myself a New Moon Milk Stout in a cute little 12oz goblet glass, and I sat in the last chair at a table of three other women. We all introduced ourselves and mentioned whether this was our first time joining (two of us were first-timers, two had been coming since the beginning), and then we dove straight into the book, and how it’s a challenging book to describe as liking or not liking because the content is not something to be described in terms of like or didn’t like. It doesn’t tell a pretty tale, but it tells a necessary one. A fifth woman soon pulled up a chair, and a few minutes later, a sixth. There were probably 30-40 people in total at this little brewery to talk about this book.

As always happened to me in college literature classes, talking about the book with other people deepened my appreciation of it. I loved lit classes and I love book clubs for this very reason. I love hearing what books made other people think about and reflect on, what messages they pulled from the text, what passages struck them, which characters mystified or magnetized them. I love asking what people thought of some section I didn’t understand, or wtf was up with that preacher, where’d he come from. I love digging in and realizing what the author was doing as we talk about all these different angles and I see things I hadn’t seen before.

I admit, I was nervous about showing up at this random thing without knowing a soul there. As soon as I saw the date of the book club, I put it on my calendar. I also kind of didn’t know, up until the time I needed to leave my house to get to the brewery, whether I would actually go. But I really really like books, and I want to meet more people in my town, and books are a thing I feel super comfortable talking about and sharing with others.

So I went. And I’m glad I did. Now I want another one and I have to wait until next year. But I think going and having such a great time opened up a book magic portal for me, because as soon as I got home, I got a library notification that Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake was ready for me to borrow. I plowed through the rest of my placeholder romantasy before I went to sleep, and today I get to start on Tom Lake.