Book Talk Novels & Stories

As I perused the books, I could feel Aidan’s gaze on me. The shop, much like the one downstairs, boasted an impressive selection. These were books to be enjoyed in the coffee lounge, not purchased or taken home. A smile tugged at my lips as I reached the romance novel section. So, Well Thumbed had these too. I wondered if they had hidden gems, perhaps something I hadn’t read or that Uncle Alex’s book club, Bound To Please, hadn’t discovered yet.

“Then don’t overthink it. You’ve had enough of men who make you doubt yourself. If Keith’s the real deal, you’ll know.” Mya nodded, grateful. “You really do sound like your brother sometimes.” Trina smirked. “Please, don’t insult me like that.” They both burst out laughing, the sound light and healing. After finishing their drinks, they wandered down the street toward the little bookstore next door. Inside, the air smelled of old paper and sandalwood. The aisles were narrow, lined with uneven stacks of novels and biographies. A cat slept on a pile of hardcovers near the window.

I cautioned, rolling up my blue shirt sleeve and cleaning off the dust cleaving to the end of my trouser. "You would be the one to regret it, and it will bring an end to everything you hold dear to your heart," Briel said, sitting on the bunk bed and swinging his feet as he spoke. "That's for me to decide, don't you think? I have a dinner date to attend right now. We will pick up this conversation right from where we stopped," I stood up and returned the book I took earlier back to its original place. The books are for remorse, confession and reformation for criminals.

The food came. They talked. Not about the board review. Not about the foundation launch or the Ashford file or the returners meeting or any of the things that constituted the operational texture of their lives. About other things. She told him about a book she had been reading — the first book she had read for no reason other than she wanted to, in longer than she could accurately remember. A novel. Something funny and specific and with no particular relevance to anything happening in her actual life, which was precisely why she had chosen it.

Are you ready? Of course you are. Who wouldn’t be? Right then, let’s begin. Here’s a biographic book review that I can read out to you for my lecture. It’s a bit of a boring piece, but it’s perfect for this exercise. This is a story about a young man who wanted to travel the world and experience everything at least once before he died. His name was Magellan. He lived a few hundred years before our time and it was this ambition of his that opened up the two hemispheres of the world to each other. Ah, did I see you yawn already. Perfect! Time to take off something... let’s start with these shoes. Ah, how liberating. Oh, look at my little toes... perfectly manicured and polished with glossy red

“Plus, this. Gotta walk the talk.” The book title was: How to Be an Effective Secret Lover. Serena laughed her heart out. She was so amused her eyes watered. “Seriously, you need a guide for that?” “I like to be thorough,” Nathaniel seriously said. “This… is uncharted territory.”

The book club ladies were in fine form this afternoon. Margaret Thompson sat primly on the floral couch in a rented out space close to the library, a half-empty teacup balanced on her knee, her Bible study notes open on the coffee table. The conversation had started with the latest Christian fiction novel — something about redemption and resisting temptation — but it had drifted, as it always did, into more personal territory. Gossip dressed up as prayer requests. “Speaking of temptation,” one of the women said, lowering her voice with dramatic concern, “have you heard what’s going around about that poor Thompson boy?”

The book launched on a Tuesday in April, which was, Killian pointed out, a fittingly unremarkable day of the week for something that was about the unremarkable daily practice of doing the right thing. The launch event was small, at a bookshop the publisher had suggested and which turned out to be exactly the right size for the kind of book it was, intimate enough that the conversation after the reading could be genuine rather than performative, large enough that the room held something.

"I'm telling you now. It's six women. We meet once a month. This month we're reading your book because it's important and it's brilliant and I want to talk about it with people who will actually understand why it matters." "Why didn't you tell me before you selected it?" "Because you would have said no. You would have thought it was too much or too personal or that people would judge you. And I needed you to show up without all that noise in your head." She's right. I would have said no. "When is it?" I ask. "Tomorrow night. Seven o'clock. My apartment." I spend the whole next day anxious. Reading my own book in front of people who have already read my book and formed opinions about what I w

The same particular quality of room that held things that mattered that had been designed for ideas and had accumulated, over the months since the address, the particular reputation of a space where true things were said. It was full. Not only with people I knew with strangers. People who had found the Fund, who had followed the story in the press coverage, who had simply seen the book listed and been moved by the description to come. The particular mix that book events had when the book was about something real not the curated literary audience, but the broader, messier, more specific audience of people who needed to hear something and had come because the title of a book had told them it w