Last night, we had our first FLX Literary Society meeting in our library. There were five of us, which felt perfect, since four of us were introverts. This idea has been brewing ever since that episode of What Should I Read Next podcast where Tiffany talked to Anne about her Literary Society.

Tiffany was flooded with DMs on Instagram of eager readers, like myself, who wanted to know more about Literary Society and how to start one of their own. Thankfully, Tiffany graciously gave us some guidelines in her Instagram highlights and was very encouraging to those of us who wanted to take her idea and run with it.

So I did. I asked a few friends if they would be interested, started a Facebook page, and set the date for our first meeting. And last night, we met and shared all of our bookish thoughts with each other.

Alan went first and talked about 11/22/63 by Stephen King, which he just finished, and also about King’s Dark Tower series, which he loved.

Susan shared a few Shel Silverstein poems from A Light in the Attic (Somebody Has To and The Little Boy & The Old Man as well as an original piece of her own writing. Susan is a witty, funny writer and we all can’t wait until she has a blog of her own!

Stephanie explained what Reddit was to all the older folk in the room and how she discovered a book called Tales from the Gas Station, a comedy-horror book by Jack Townsend.

Jenny introduced us to The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, a novel told through the dog’s perspective. She said this book will make you cry, but has a happy ending. She also told us about Travels by Michael Crichton, which was a travel memoir from his younger years, and The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, which is a mystery set in Maine that alternatives between time periods. The book she’s reading now, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks sounded like a good personal growth book and reminded me of Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.

I talked about The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton, that I finished earlier in the week. The writing in this book is beautiful. I wanted to read whole passages over again just to listen to the those words. Her writing reminds me a bit of Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow. The stories in this book are centered around a house in the English countryside where a ghost resides. Many characters from different time periods are all connected in some way to this house. The ghost’s narration is interspersed with third person POVs of the various characters in their various time periods. It was an ambitious book to take all of those people and find a way to connect them to the house. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the audio version.

I also shared about The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne, a book about a gay young man growing up in Catholic Ireland during the fifties and sixties. And I talked abut She’s My Dad by Jonathan Williams, a book I’ll share more about in a review next week, and about the most bizarre book I read in 2018: Convenience Store Woman a story told from a socio-path’s perspective by Sayaka Murata.

Other books mentioned were From a Buick 8, Dr. Sleep,  Joyland by Stephen King, the Jonathan Maberry series that starts with Ghost Road Blues, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.

Check out our Facebook page for video snippets and photos of our first meeting! Have you ever thought of starting a Literary Society? I’d love to hear from you in comments!