My June 4 column for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Datebook—complete with a list of all 258 books my club has read.)
My book club started during the Reagan administration. The original members all worked at KPIX television in San Francisco, and somehow we discovered we all had a passion for good literature, serious stuff as opposed to best-sellers. We also discovered we’d all come of age during a time when the classics had been set aside in most higher education literature classes and replaced by what was alleged to be more relevant material. We had a hunger for reading what we’d missed—Tolstoy, Henry James, Jane Austen and the like—so that became our focus. And we’d read fiction exclusively.