Sisters With Books formed in 1992 (four years prior to Oprah’s influential one), by a half-dozen book-loving African American teachers from the Los Angeles Unified School District. The founders wanted an adult activity that didn’t involve their children. They formed the club and books from Terry McMillan, Pearl Cleage, and Octavia Butler were voraciously welcomed by an underserved Black female audience. At the same time, an interest in books by the likes of Harlem Renaissance writers Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Nella Larsen were being rediscovered.
Twenty-eight years later with a current roster of 31 Black women, SWB is still going strong after hundreds of meetings and 300 books. The books we read, many with themes rooted in the past of our descendants, often remind us that as African American women, we are forever bound by the unique legacy of our ancestors’ enslavement.
Here is a custom that exists, today as it did four centuries ago, that anyone who wishes to enter the Bodleian Library in Oxford as a reader is obliged to make a formal declaration of how they will and will not behave. In addition to promising that they will not remove any book, or “mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody”, it is expressly forbidden to “bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame”. The original impetus behind this was to prevent cold scholars (and dons) from creating makeshift pockets of warmth in the library’s draughty corridors, but the guiding principle has always been the preservation of its books.
In Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity,” a record-store owner named Rob Fleming commemorates a bad breakup by reorganizing his vinyl collection. He decides to order his records not alphabetically, but personally — by when each of the hundreds in his collection entered his life. After he’s finished, he’s “flushed with a sense of self, because this, after all, is who I am.” That only he can discern the order is the point of the exercise. “If I want to play, say, ‘Blue’ by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the autumn of 1983, and thought better of giving it to her, for reasons I don’t really want to go into.”
In a way, Judith Flanders’s fascinating new book, “A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order,” is a meditation on Rob’s task: What does the way we order knowledge reveal about how we see knowledge itself? Inventions vital to the information age, like the printing press and the transistor, didn’t create knowledge, but, rather, new ways to access it. “Without sorting,” Flanders, a social historian and research fellow at the University of Buckingham, in England, writes, “all the knowledge in the world would lie in great unsifted stacks of books, themselves unfindable, unread and unknown.”
Where the Wild Ladies Are would make for great Halloween reading, although these aren't the same old horror stories you've encountered before — they're novel, shimmering masterworks from a writer who seems incapable of being anything less than original.
But the man who made a meme out of Nietzsche’s notion that “time is a flat circle” isn’t going to tell a simple story about hard work and steady forward progress. By his reckoning, his fame wasn’t so much about raw ambition as much as it was with being preternaturally all right, all right, all right with everything, every step of the way.