Friday from the Archives: “For Every Passion Something: The Myriad Book Clubs of North Carolina” by Cynthia Lewis in NCLR 2016
As Editor Margaret Bauer likes to tell her students, Good Writers are also Good Readers. Since we’re still in the thick of summer, perhaps you are toes in the sand, beach read in hand? Or using the later sunsets to edit your latest writing? Or maybe your book club has commenced an ambitious read for this season?
Book Clubs are part of the long history of reading in the Writing-est State. In our 25th Anniversary issue in 2016, Cynthia Lewis wrote, “The state’s oldest book clubs rose alongside the establishment of public libraries and even helped to found them. Greenville’s End of the Century Book Club, whose name refers to its inception in 1899, was, according to members Mary Harris Everett and Cecilia Moore-Cobb, “the first one organized in Pitt County and was instrumental in starting a library that became Sheppard Memorial Public Library in Pitt County.”
Reading clubs of all kinds are available, no matter what you like to read or who you want to be companioned with while discussing. Lewis explained “…the more you explore the vast variety of such clubs in North Carolina, the less meaningful becomes the concept of “usual.” It’s a terrain as mixed as the state’s topography, and surveying it is rather like inventorying pebbles on Beech Mountain. Avid readers appear to have endless imagination for conjuring themes for clubs, and a club would seem to exist for every imaginable fancy.” Included in the long list is one that piques our interest: “at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines, books exclusively by writers inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.”
Neighborhoods, churches, libraries, and our beloved independent bookstores all play host or curator for the magnitude of clubs. And if your club reads NC lit, don’t be surprised to bump into the author themselves. Lewis shared that “Mr. Jacoby tells the story of the group’s discussion in the fall of 2013 over the selection of books for the several months ahead. “We all agreed that we’d kick off 2014 with Wiley Cash’s A Land More Kind Than Home (a novel set near Asheville),” he says. “Immediately after that decision was made, a customer who was browsing the shelves nearby and who happened to overhear our discussion, came over to express his approval of our choice. It was Wiley Cash.”
Read the entire essay on Gale Cengage and pick up a 2016 issue today!
