Book Club

Augusta Scattergood, Contributing Editor

Better Than Oprah Book Club (BTOBC)

Hollywood, SC (just outside Charleston, SC)

Stono Ferry Plantation is a friendly community built on historic ground – the site of an important Revolutionary War battle. Founded in 1999 by two of the residents, BTOBC has some 15 active and enthusiastic members.

The meetings are held every other month in a member’s home, although recently we added an extra month. February seemed to be the best choice because it’s a dreary time of year and a good time to read more and have an extra meeting. We begin by each person, in turn, giving a personal review of the current book choice, and at the end of the evening there is an open discussion. Many are lively and some are so disparate, it’s hard to believe that we all read the same book!

We have wine and the volunteer hostess of the month provides some treats and, if appropriate, uses the theme of the book for the food. When we discussed Desert Queen, we had savory Middle Eastern stuffed pastries called samosas and Arab cookies called mamool. To celebrate the Greek setting of The Island, we enjoyed stuffed grape leaves, dolmas, and that honey sweet pastry, baklava. We also had the Greek wine called Retsina – definitely an acquired taste.

So that we each get a fair turn of choosing the bi-monthly book choice, November is voting time for the forthcoming year’s book picks. Each member brings two choices with a brief synopsis and then we vote, so it’s all very democratic. Spacing out the reading material through the year, we try to mix the light with the more serious side. This gives us a wide range of subjects – fiction and non-fiction. Our book choices have made us realize that inside these pages we travel the world!

One of our journeys was down the Amazon River with Teddy Roosevelt in the early 1900s. Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt took us down that mighty river and showed us another world of rarely-seen inhabitants – human as well as animal. We trekked through the Arabian Desert with a remarkable English lady called Gertrude Bell in Desert Queen by Janet Wallach. And, in the sands of Arabia, we learned much of a culture that is so relevant today.

Wending our way through the canals of Venice in The City of Falling Angels, we had an insider view of that often inscrutable city, as the author, John Berendt, cozied up to the cognoscenti. Oswald Wynd’s The Ginger Tree took us to China in 1903 with a young English bride who became caught up in a confl ict of Asian and Western cultures. And, in Khaled ­­Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, we traveled a long, painful journey into the harsh terrain of Afghanistan. In our most recent book, we visited an island in Greece called Spinalonga with its tragic past as a leper colony as told by Victoria Hislop in The Island.

Keeper of the House, a novel by Rebecca T. Godwin, landed us in our own backyard – Charleston. In this book, set in the 1920s, we visited a bordello near Charleston (the location based on fact we are told). Traveling further in the South, Eudora Welty’s classic Delta Wedding gave us a visit to Mississippi, Edward P. Jones to Virginia in The Known World, and Linda Bloodworth Thomason sent us to Arkansas in Liberating Paris. 

Reading takes us on other travels, too – into the worlds of history and politics, and into the lives and emotions of the characters who inhabit the page of the books we read, and so into a broader knowledge of life.

Submitted by Frances Monaco, Hollywood, SC.­