An interview with Carol Lorton, a member of the Aerobic Book Club.
What is the Aerobic Book Club? It came out of a Howard County Parks and Recreation Cardio-Crunch class. The instructor and several class members wanted another reason to get together outside of class, and the book club was born. Just out of that class, we have about a dozen people who have a good reason to get together to have lunch - a book is a good reason.
Are you still doing aerobics together? Oh, yes, we like to work out, read and eat. We rotate book club lunch at each other's houses and try to fashion the food according to the book. We have a good time.
Does your club favor one genre over another? No. In the last six months, we've made a real effort to read a classic, a nonfiction or a mystery or historical fiction. And not necessarily something on the best-seller list. We also try to look for books in paperback.
What is your club reading this month? We're reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
Over the two years you've been meeting together, what have been the favorites? They liked Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. They liked The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland. We just did Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. It's a classic. One of the members bought a book that listed good reads for book clubs. We read through it and this [Bread Givers] sounded interesting. It was a turn-of-the century story of immigrants coming to the New World, to New York. It had the struggles of Old World/New World and the role of women in the early 1920s. The same struggle we have now - marriage, family, career.
Are your members career women? No. We're at home during the day. ... But we have an artist, a social worker, our aerobics instructor, a horsewoman and a former tax attorney in our group. We've all had careers at one time. We're all there because we like each other's company and we really like to read. We're the quilting bees of our grandmother's generation.
Do you have a format for discussion? No. It's kind of "loosey-goosey." We've been trying to get more focus in our discussion. We've been using reader guides. We've found that if we have very strong opinions, those opinions lead us toward a great discussion. If it's an OK book, there's no discussion, frankly.
