Makioka Sisters Book Club

For the past 12 years, we’ve been meeting in Westchester, N.Y., Fairfield County, Conn., and New York City to talk about books. We’re a pretty diverse group of women: some married, some single; some mothers, some not; some gainfully employed, some home with kids, some transitioning one way or the other. Professionally, we are writers, editors, teachers, lawyers, and a designer.

We’ve been reading together for so long that we have dropped any attempt at choosing books democratically. We each get to choose a book for the group, no questions asked. But experience has shown us that contemporary fiction and classic literature lend themselves to the best discussions. We do read non-fiction, mostly memoirs, some biographies, but not as often.

Over time, we’ve dispensed with a lot of the social chit-chat about kids, school, husbands, work, sticking ever more closely to the text and the topics that spring directly from there: politics, religion, morality, gender, race, sex, culture.

All those years ago we started with Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters and, this coming week, we’ll be meeting to talk about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (And here’s our blog’s first plug: If you’re considering re-reading Stowe’s classic novel, take a look at Henry Louis Gates’s new annotated edition, which includes two provocative introductory essays and gives some context to the book’s many cringe-producing moments.)