Over 100 people start singing in unison.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to us, happy birthday dear us, happy birthday to us!”
The song ends with Eclectic Book Review Club president Mary Lu Larson asking attendees to enjoy cupcakes before launching into the monthly meeting at the Field Club of Omaha.
This, the book club’s October meeting, celebrated a major milestone for the Omaha-based group: 75 years in existence. The club has grown larger and less exclusive over the decades, but it remains committed to its founding principles of promoting literacy and socialization.
That makes it somewhat of a bulwark against two troubling trends: sputtering book readership and persistent loneliness.
“Book clubs, because you’re discussing a text, it allows you to be vulnerable in a way that if you were talking about yourself, you couldn’t share those thoughts or feelings,” said Nick Stager, publisher of the book review platform BookBrowse.
The Eclectic Book Review Club’s origins date back to 1949, when 28 women attended the inaugural meeting at the Hill Hotel in downtown Omaha, according to member Kathy Schwarting, who researched the club’s history as part of its 75th anniversary.
Mrs. John Jesse reviewed “The Thread That Runs So True,” a memoir by Jesse Stuart about growing up in Kentucky and becoming a teacher. Attendees had lunch, listened and enjoyed an afternoon game of bridge.
Joining the club was no easy task in the early days, member Mary Jane McCullough Meehan told BookWomen magazine in 2011. “The original club was quite formally organized, with prospective members sponsored by two current members and voted on by the organization,” said McCullough Meehan, who died in 2020. “No new member could be older than 50.”
Dressed to impress, they came with $1 for their member dues and $1.35 for lunch, according to Schwarting. Despite the rigors of gaining entry, the club grew rapidly, exploding from 70 members in 1950 to 150 members just three years later.
A total of 131 people – 106 dues-paying members and 25 guests – attended the celebratory October meeting. Dues now cost $20 per year, plus the cost of lunch.
Joining is far easier today. Most people find out about the group through friends who are members. Carol Johnson, a club officer, learned of Eclectic through a friend who saw a newspaper advertisement. They attended a meeting together over 10 years ago, and Johnson has been a member ever since.
Membership still skews heavily to women, with only a handful of men present at the October meeting. Most are avid readers on the lookout for new books, said Jo Ann Peterson, the club’s membership chair.
One difference from the club’s formative days: most current members are retirees. The monthly meetings are held on Tuesdays at noon – “a carryover from those early days” – which makes it harder for working adults to attend, Johnson said.
Eclectic Book Review Club is, and has always been, a twist on the typical book club. Members do not all read the same book ahead of the monthly get-togethers. Instead, they listen to an author or reviewer discuss a book of their choosing. Presenting authors are typically local or regional.
The format makes Eclectic unique, but it’s far from the only club putting a spin on the traditional book club format, said Carl Erickson, event and community outreach coordinator at The Bookworm.
The Omaha bookstore works with many clubs including some “once a year” groups where members each pick a book at the same point in the year. The rest of the year is spent swapping titles. One of those clubs dates back four generations, Erickson said.
Johnson appreciates Eclectic’s model. Primarily a reader of mysteries and thrillers, she said the luncheons have exposed her to a range of genres. “The Women Who Built Omaha: A Bold and Remarkable History” by Eileen Wirth was among her favorites.
“Learning about the community through what the authors have written and what they’ve investigated, that’s been important to me,” Johnson said.
Club members’ heightened interest in books makes them part of a shrinking group of Americans: avid readers. A survey by Gallup in early 2022 found that the average number of books Americans reported reading fell to 12.6 per year – the smallest number Gallup had recorded since starting the survey in 1990.
The overall percentage of Americans who read books appears to be more stable. A 2021 survey by Pew Research found 23% of respondents hadn’t read a single book in the previous year. That number hasn’t changed significantly since 2011.
At the October meeting, members heard from author Carla Ketner and illustrator Paula Wallace. The two talked about their book “Ted Kooser: More Than A Local Wonder,” a children’s book on the life of the Iowa-born Pulitzer Prize winning poet now living in Garland, Nebraska.
Ketner, a former elementary school teacher who until recently owned an independent bookstore in Seward, got the idea for the book five years earlier from an unexpected source.
“I was in my basement working on a book that I was writing, and my son walked through the room and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ So I told him I was working on a book, and he said, ‘Well, you should write a book about Ted.’”
Ketner recalled feeling floored that she hadn’t thought of the idea.
“And then my second thought was, ‘there’s no way I could write a book about Ted Kooser, because he’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and I’m a nobody who’s never had a book published. There’s no way I could do justice to him.’ So I kind of put that idea in the back of my brain.”
But a few days later when a regular customer came into Chapters, Ketner’s book store, seeking a Kooser biography for her daughter’s school assignment, Ketner had a change of heart. Her book, along with Wallace’s illustrations, was published in November 2023.
Eclectic members say they enjoy the socialization that the club fosters. Members often arrive early for “the social aspect of meeting and visiting with interesting and accomplished fellow members,” Peterson said.
Social activities like book clubs can help ward off isolation and loneliness, which have garnered increased concern in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple studies have found a link between social connections and longer lives, according to a 2023 U.S. surgeon general health advisory that deemed loneliness an epidemic.
Stager, the BookBrowse publisher, noted that book clubs not only provide people a forum to meet with friends regularly, they also lead to conversations that allow for emotional intimacy.
“Books really give you the opportunity to establish that vulnerability and intimacy, because you can do it in a way that isn’t directly through your own experience, so it doesn’t produce that social anxiety or that social barrier that other more direct forms of communication can.”
In reflecting on Eclectic’s 75-year history, members noted they’ve had some memorable meetings over the years. There was the time in the past year when tornado sirens forced the meeting into the basement of Field Club.
Then there was the time the club landed astronaut Clayton Anderson as a speaker. The Nebraska native went to space in 2007 as part of Expedition 15. The club, Larson admitted, went over budget bringing him in for the meeting. But he delivered a memorable talk, she added.
“I just wanted to shake his hand, I just wanted to be able to say that I shook the hand and touched someone who’s been in space,” Larson said.
1 Comment
As a member of the Eclectic Book Review Club, I enjoyed this article. Well done. I attended the October 2024 meeting and participated in the festivities. Reading is a great pasttime and way to expand one’s knowledge and stimulate the brain. As a member of 7-8 bookclubs, I can vouch for the benefit of socialization and have formed many friendships.