We appreciate the support of all of our book club fans! We are available for book club discussions via skype or I-Chat. Book clubs let us carry that communal joy over from writing to reading. And reading can be lonely, too, when you are transported by a story and want to share that exalted feeling with someone. Writing can be a lonely profession, but in our partnership we have solved that problem. It is so much fun for us to hear what creates lively discussion and what isn’t resonating-we always learn something. From groups of grannies reading Dedication and imagining getting swept off their feet by Frank Sinatra to teens playing through media literacy issues in The Real Real, we have joined groups in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and Skyped with groups as far away as Sweden. So you can imagine how amazing it was for us when friends and relatives started asking if we would join their book clubs when they read one of our books. Whether the group inspires us to read something we may not have picked up, The Tipping Point, Reading Lolita in Tehran, or re-introduces us to an old favorite, The Wonder Boys, we love getting together with our friends over wine and take-out and discussing the themes, leitmotifs, and imagery, the structure and diction, what we enjoyed, what confused us, and what were the authors intentions.

So we were very excited when some of our friends proposed a few years later that we start book clubs. Understandably, then, graduating and being left to read on our own was quite a shock and left us both very lonely and nostalgic for the kind of discourse we had had, but maybe without the long papers and exams. So far from taking a few English classes, our entire education was one long intensive seminar on the history of Western literature. Every class surveyed a theme from Antiquity, through the Renaissance and into modern classics. For example, if you wanted to study water, you would read The Odyssey, The Tempest and then To the Lighthouse. We met at NYU in a program called The Gallatin School, which teaches its entire curriculum through the cannon. I enjoyed reading about how much their book clubs mean to them, and I hope you do too!

I am so glad to welcome Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus to Book Club Exchange. I enjoyed this book and was extremely curious to see all of the characters twelve years later. Earlier this year, I reviewed NANNY RETURNS, the sequel to the best-selling THE NANNY DIARIES, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus.

The real real emma mclaughlin