“On the same page” is a series featuring Utah book clubs.
Editor’s note: If you have a book club and you are interested in being featured, please contact us at features@deseretnews.com. Please include your name, your contact information and one or two sentences describing your book club.
SALT LAKE CITY — When Julie Porter of Mapleton moved into a new house, built-in bookshelves were a must. But the shelves weren’t quite ready when the family moved in.
“All of my books were in boxes and so it was like my friends were not with me,” Porter said in an interview with the Deseret News.
Instead of keeping the books boxed up until the bookshelves were finished, Porter unloaded them and stacked them along a wall in the house while the bookshelves were installed.
“For six months, I just had to just have my friends out there,” she said with a laugh.
And Porter loves her friends. As a teacher and self-proclaimed bibliophile, she belongs to four book groups, one of which is based in Utah County and called the Reader’s Knot. The book group recently celebrated its 30th anniversary.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Deseret News: How did the Reader’s Knot start?
Julie Porter: It started in the neighborhood. It was actually started as like a church class but for women that didn’t want to do crafts, which I think is hilarious. We have a number of sisters in the group and just kind of was word of mouth of people that wanted to come and be part of the group. So that one is great because like I said, we’ve really talked about the book. There’s always a little author sketch at the beginning so ... you know things about the author and and then everybody loves to read their favorite passages.
DN: How did the group get its name?
JP: The leader of our book group, Lori Raymond, mentioned to us after a few years that we needed to call ourselves something more than just “book group.” She wanted something we could put on T-shirts or mugs. We tossed around quite a few suggestions but ended up being Democratic and just voted for the one we liked best which was, the Reader’s Knot. One of our members, Jane Coleman, created a complicated knot that had each of our initials in it to suggest that we were all entwined together through our love of books and the sharing of them with each other. Our group has grown larger to incorporate other friends and family, but the name has remained.
DN: What is one of your favorite memories of the Reader’s Knot?
JP: They (book club members) read the book “When the Emperor Was Divine,” and it’s about the Japanese internment camp in Utah, Topaz. And then they all took a field trip to it. I happen to be busy that night. So I went a couple of months later with my sister. And it was just so fun to be able to read that book to go. They have a little museum where the internment camp was. That’s the kind of thing that when we can kind of expand on that, like, we’ve also gone to Marilynne Robinson, and we went to hear her speak, she came to UVU. … We’ve also done some fun things because ... we just love everything British so we actually have a woman in our group from Scotland. And so we did a high tea at Little America. Yeah, so it’s so fun, we all dressed up, he have hats and just enjoy the tea and just growing up together. ... (And) we have a great Christmas party every year where we bring a book.
DN: What book surprised you most?
JP: We had one (book group member) that chose “The World’s Strongest Librarian” about a guy in Salt Lake who has Tourette’s (syndrome). He wrote it so it’s an autobiography. It was just such a new world for me. Going into it, I didn’t know what it was going to be about. And then she (the book group member) added so much to the discussion. She showed video clips of him actually speaking and how hard it was for him. When they (book group members) put in some time to actually show you about the author and maybe a video clip or something from an interview, it’s just totally changed my perspective. … I just found that I have so much more empathy when you can understand something from somebody else’s perspective, and that’s what reading brought to me.
DN: Is there anything special going on with your book club coming up in the future?
JP: We’re just going to meet up at the restaurant, just so we could have kind of a celebratory feel to it. Everybody is supposed to bring a book that really made a difference for them as part of the book group, and why they chose it. And then we decided that might be a little hard so that gave everybody five minutes. This is the time to kind of celebrate and recognize. You create this colleague of people that you work with in the book group because you’ve been through ... their heartaches. With family situations, or as they open up about things that happened to them in the past and they really do become kind of like another family too. So this is a good way to just celebrate that time of recognizing each other and what books can do for us.
DN: What’s your book club reading right now?
JP: Next month we’re reading the first book they (the book group) ever read, which is “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. ... They just thought that would be kind of fun to go back to the very first book. Thirty years ago that was the first book.
The Reader’s Knot recommends:
”Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austen, Penguin Random House, 384 pages (f)
“Three Men in a Boat,” by Jerome K. Jerome, Penguin Random House, 150 pages (f)
“Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Bronte, Penguin Random House, 528 pages (f)
“Gilead,” by Marilynne Robinson, Macmillan Publishers, 256 pages (f)
“Global Mom,” by Melissa Dalton-Bradford, Familius, 320 pages (nf)
“Les Miserables,” by Victor Hugo, Simon and Schuster, 656 pages (f)
”To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee, Harper Collins, 336 pages (f)
“Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,” by Jung Chang, Simon & Schuster, 528 pages (nf)
“A Gentleman in Moscow,” by Amor Towles, Penguin Random House, 736 (f)
”Crossing to Safety” by Wallace Stegner, Modern Library, 368 pages, (f)