I know, I know—we were in the middle of a series of posts about Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, but I’d like to hit pause on that to share some exciting news with you all: I have acquired my first byline! So, apologies, but you will have to live in suspense as regards the nineteenth-century novel I was previewing—it’s a lot to ask, but I’m confident that you will find the strength to abide the delay—as I tell you about something really cool called Silent Book Club.

Unlike traditional book clubs, Silent Book Club has no assigned reading. You don’t have to read what other people are reading—although you can, if you want to. Like traditional book clubs, Silent Book Club brings book lovers together to talk about books and interesting ideas, make new friends, and hang out with old friends.

What do people do at a Silent Book Club meeting? Well, first, we bring whatever book we’re reading to the venue, and we order a drink; meetings are often held at places like bars, wine bars, breweries, and the like (though, of course, there’s no obligation to drink alcohol, and people order what they please). Then, we alternate between chatting informally about books and anything else we feel like yammering about, and reading in friendly silence.

I first heard of Silent Book Club through an article in Poets & Writers magazine. Upon learning that the nearest club was farther from my home than I wanted to travel, I started my own local club. This was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I discovered that Silent Book Club is a great way to meet interesting, smart, and fun people. It’s also a great way to get some reading done.

I have been hosting Silent Book Club meetings for two years now, and our club has recently expanded from offering meetings every other week to offering meetings most weeks, at two different times and days so more people can participate. We also recently took a “field trip” to a bookstore / wine bar in a nearby town, which was great fun.

But back to my exciting news—I was invited to write a blog post for the Silent Book Club website, and it is now live! I invite you to read my article New Year’s Book Solutions, which is about tips for making time for reading. If you’ve ever struggled to find the time to read, or if you, like me, have made a New Year’s resolution to read books, you may find something useful in there. Click here to read the article!

I want to thank you all for reading my writing—it means a lot to me. I hope it helps you in some way. Our regularly scheduled programming will resume on Wednesday. Until then, stay safe, stay warm, and keep on reading, folks.

Thanks to Masterpiece on PBS, I recently discovered and read an incredibly good novel. Written and set approximately 150 years ago, in the late 1800s, the book is about—as far as I can tell—Amazon.com.

But let me explain. I was browsing through my local brick-and-mortar book store, which fortunately still existed at that moment in time, for that was where I happened across a book with a cover featuring TV actors in period costume. As I am not a big watcher of TV or movies, such covers usually turn me off. However, this particular cover featured a famous name: Émile Zola.

Having never read anything by the great French writer Émile Zola, I impulsively snatched up the book, deciding, on the spot, that my acquaintance with this author could be delayed no longer. Truly, I couldn’t help it! Call it feminine weakness, if you will. Or, call it a helpless surrender to consumerist culture. In any case, there I was, inserting my credit card into a chip reader, in exchange for an exquisitely pretty paperback labelled The Paradise—but which I soon discovered was originally titled The Ladies’ Paradise.

In the novel, The Ladies’ Paradise is the name of a large store in Paris that is crushing the small businesses nearby. Women are nearly powerless before it: they roam its galleries in awe of the delicate merchandise, and they flock from within and outside of the city to purchase the fabrics and ready-made clothes on offer. Meanwhile, the mom-and-pop competition try to hold their own by adhering to old-fashioned values such as artistry, intimate knowledge of a particular trade and its goods, family-oriented service, and high prices that indicate value. Zola describes one small-business-owning family in this way:

“The Baudus were not a bad sort of people. But they complained of never having had any luck.”

That is—unluckily for them, most customers preferred cheaper prices, more spectacle and grandeur, and a wide and ever-increasing selection of merchandise.

“Had anyone ever seen such a thing?” Monsieur Baudu rants at one point. “A draper’s shop selling everything! Why not call it a bazaar at once? And the employees! . . . treating goods and customers like so many parcels . . . No affection, no manners, no taste!”

Sound familiar? Twenty-five years ago, had anyone ever heard of a bookstore selling everything?! Treating customers like so many shipping boxes?! No taste!!

Thus the wisdom of Zola was revealed to me; a 150-year-old story that resonates so well today must be describing some sort of universal theme. And best of all: the author does not take sides. He does not present big business owners as any better or worse than small business owners. He presents them all as humans making choices—and the moral is that those who obstinately refuse to adapt to changing times, and those who fail to actively, persistently work toward positive innovation, will suffer for their inflexibility, no matter who they are.

How do you handle the choice between shopping big and global, versus small and local? How do your favorite small businesses stay in the black—have they made innovations, or developed specialties, that enable them to compete successfully in a difficult marketplace? Have your favorite big businesses made innovations, or developed specialties, as well?

Here is a strange and, when you think about it, disturbing fact about our culture: Girls are more often, and more openly, encouraged to do “boy things” than boys are to do “girl things.”

Can it be a good thing—for our personal relationships and for society—for females to grow up with an awareness of and appreciation for males, without the reverse occurring?

A few weeks ago, I was gift shopping for a boy in kindergarten and his younger sister. I bought three books with male protagonists, thinking that both of them could read and enjoy the books. I shied away from the books with female protagonists, thinking that only one of them would appreciate those.

And then I read the Washington Post article What are we teaching boys when we discourage them from reading books about girls? This article says it perfectly. It is one of the most profoundly important articles I have read this year. It’s not a long article, but every sentence is a gem. I urge you to read it.

How wrong I was in that bookstore! And I consider myself an open-minded person! Ach! I am upset with myself, but the situation is easy to rectify: I’m going to go back and buy the kids three more books—with girl protagonists.

So many of us spend so much time consuming media about national and international politics, and yet it’s often difficult to apply the abstract concepts and faraway events we hear and read about to the concrete details and local happenings of our personal lives.

But then, sometimes things get personal.

While browsing through my fave local indie bookstore, I noticed a pretty novel on display. Its cover had a pink-and-blue, rose-and-streamers-like pattern, overlaid with two circles indicating two awards won. I bent it open and read these two powerhouse opening sentences:

“Isma was going to miss her flight. The ticket wouldn’t be refunded, because the airline took no responsibility for passengers who arrived at the airport three hours ahead of the departure time and were escorted to an interrogation room.”

What a lovely use of language; and this loveliness continues throughout Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire. And what a beautiful opening setup for a novel about a British Muslim family torn apart by national and international affairs. Politics can’t get any more personal than finding oneself in an interrogation room. And this is only the first of a series of increasingly harrowing scenes in which politics crash into the lives of Shamsie’s characters.

In what ways have politics been personal for you?

So I did it—just couldn’t help it!—I judged a book by its cover and title and nothing else.

An ad in a magazine caught my eye. The cover was a bold splash of color, which on closer inspection turned out to be face paint on a face. The title was Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal. I was intrigued.

My local bookstore didn’t have it in stock, but I found it at the bookstore across town. After the briefest of flips through the pages, I bought it.

As it turns out, Perfect Me is a scholarly work by British philosopher Heather Widdows. The style is so scholarly, in fact, that I remain pleasantly astonished that it was in stock at a bookstore not attached to a university. The work is about the judging of people, including others and oneself, by how well they conform to modern—and, Widdows argues, increasingly global—beauty ideals. She argues that we should not judge people for either conforming to norms or not conforming to norms:

“Women recognize the extreme costs of rejecting all beauty norms,” she writes, pointing out that adhering to beauty standards can offer real benefits, from career and social successes to the joys of self-improvement and communal bonding. On the other hand, not adhering to beauty standards can save significant time, money, and effort; be better for one’s health; and promote more positive societal values.

Do you sometimes find yourself, despite yourself, judging others or yourself (or books!) superficially?