Book Club Gone Rogue

I belong to a somewhat unconventional book club--we'd like to think of ourselves as a rogue group, but since we're all teachers, women, and somewhat nice people who meet in a coffee shop, it's difficult to get people to buy that. Maybe if we started meeting in a motorcycle bar. Or in an abandoned factory down by the tracks.

Only those places don't have coffee and yummy pastries and comfy chairs gathered around a coffee table. The other problem is that other than coloring outside the lines when establishing the rules for our club, the most dangerous thing we do is refuse to wear socks in all but the coldest weather and willingly spend all day with middle schoolers and first graders.

The group is small--just the 4 of us. A. and I started meeting just because we've been friends since her son was in my class and she was a parent helper. We missed the days of chatting over coffee in my classroom and had started recommending book titles to each other. One day we met at the coffee shop to exchange stacks of books and the nontraditional book club was formed.

For a long time it was just the two of us. That was the first slightly out of the ordinary thing about our club--most people don't consider 2 people enough for a real club. However, we like to think that our personalities are big enough to pull it off.

The second unconventional thing we did is refuse to read the same book at the same time and then discuss it. Instead, our meetings are part book talk about books we want each other to read and part spilling our guts about what we'd thought about the books we'd urged upon each other at the last meeting.

Oh, and meetings. They are somewhat less than regular. We meet when we need something to read, want to push books on each other, or when we want a reason to spend time in the coffee shop with other girls.

After a while, A. and I thought that maybe we should expand our club. A. invited her teacher-daughter and I invited a young teacher-friend. B. and L. are great additions to the group, and they like our rules. A. and I sometimes wonder if we are corrupting the young.

Our newest adventure is blogging. I started a while back, and decided it was time to corrupt expand the horizons of the rest of the group. I thought that if I enjoyed it and it was good for me as a writer, it must be good for others, right?

We met recently, but with no books or book talk (see? rogue!). We made sure that everyone had a blog set up, spent a very long time playing with the backgrounds (we like to look good), and made sure each person posted. Tonight, I sent a nagging reminder to the others and the text messages started flying. Imagine my chagrin when L. and A. both had ideas and I had nothing! Then they both posted before me. I toyed with the idea of just typing out the text messages, as we like to think that we are rather clever; however, that involved some risk (what if we find out we're not clever? or funny?).

So instead you get the slightly skewed history of our following-our-own-rules book club. Happy reading girls!