”How to Read a Book” might be the perfect pick to really light a fire under my book club, and yours. It’s a charming, openhearted novel, deceptively easy to read but layered with sharp observations, hard truths and rich ideas.
Set in Portland, Maine, the novel opens in a women’s prison book club full of caustic inmates whose spirited discussions reveal a thick vein of humor and a weary compassion. According to Violet, a young woman with a manslaughter conviction and a gift for wicked turns of phrase, the weekly meetings are the highlight of a prison life so dull that “every day: same, same, same. The boredom feels like lice and you itch all over.” She and her fellow members have insulted every book choice but, she admits, “sometimes a sparkling sentence can really rip you up.”
Violet’s voice is self-aware, with a haunting fragility beneath the tough talk. And just as we fall for her we also meet Frank, a bookstore handyman still stunned by the death of his wife in a drunk-driving accident — caused by Violet. So much for easy! Wadsworth Books, a warm and welcoming independent bookstore full of young people and foster cats, is also the favorite haunt of our third narrative voice: the book club’s leader, Harriet, a widowed English teacher who is struggling to find purpose. “Retired people were often thought to be lonely, but it wasn’t that. It was the feeling of uselessness, of being done with it all,” she reflects. Harriet cultivates her prison book club as if gardening, “exposing the women to the open air of literature, to the sunshine of fresh ideas.” When Violet is released from prison, Harriet bumps into her at the bookstore and must hustle her to safety as Frank suffers a full meltdown.
Even after these three lives are neatly entangled (and recounted in alternating chapters), the heart of the story remains Violet, who stumbles into a job as an assistant at a research lab dedicated to proving that African gray parrots don’t just talk but also think (at last, real talking animals!). As she makes her fresh start, with the help of Harriet and occasional acts of random kindness from strangers, Violet still has to face Frank and the tragedy she caused.
Harriet instructs us that “stories have a ‘meanwhile’ — an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along,” and so the many layers of “meanwhile” delicately accrue. The novel asks us to stop and consider: Which kinds of people deserve second chances? Are people their worst acts, or a lifetime of better days? Is it possible to stop judging fictional characters (or each other in this divided, angry world) long enough to see that we are all “fellow creatures”? Personally, I want to talk about the parrots whose powers of cognition did nothing to free them from their life sentences.
Another “meanwhile”: The story here also serves as a meditation on the power of books. While Edgar Lee Masters’s 1915 poetry collection “Spoon River Anthology” plays a prominent role, works from J.D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Butler Yeats to Zadie Smith and Maya Angelou underpin and suffuse every chapter.
“Harriet had always considered Angelou a tad pious,” Wood notes — a pot-calling-kettle moment that made me chortle, as “How to Read a Book” nudges the conscience as much as it pulls at the heartstrings. But it is also generously seasoned with unexpected twists and a wonderful wit. It’s never saccharine. In book clubs and in life, sometimes you just need a break from the sense of gritty hopelessness. This novel is a reminder that goodness, and books, can still win in this world.
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