On Sunday evenings since 1974, a group of Monroe book-lovers has been getting together to read.
That's it: read.
In a way, it's the anti-book club. There's no theme, no genre focus, no moderator, no list of discussion questions and no pressure. Members takes turns picking the book, then they read out loud to one another for an hour and a half after a potluck dinner. It's called, simply, "the reading group."
"Don Quixote" took them nearly two years.
Suzann Holland, director of Monroe Public Library and the group's newest member, remembers her confusion at the first meeting. She'd been told the group was reading Thornton Wilder's "Theophilus North."
"I hurried and read it, and then I got here - and they were reading it," she said.
* * *
Members have come and gone through the years, but the core group of founders from the 1970s is still hooked four decades later on this slow-paced, communal style of consuming literature.
Tom Fey, Barbara Woodriff and her then-husband were neighbors when they started getting together on Sunday evenings in 1974 to read out loud. At first, they'd just snack on popcorn and cereal as they went.
"It was kind of like Sunday night radio," Woodriff said.
When husband and wife John and Mary Frantz joined a few years later, they formalized things by instituting a potluck supper to precede the reading. Even then, the Frantzes were the elders of the group. Now both 92 years old, they've since retired from careers as physicians at Monroe Clinic and moved to downtown Madison to live in a retirement community, but they still come back to Monroe on Sunday evenings.
The reading group is "something to look forward to on Sundays instead of that sinking feeling" of another work week ahead, said Mary Frantz.
Her husband calls the reading group a "quasi-religious secular support group."
The group just enjoys reading together. Cathy Goray, a member with her husband John for nine years, likes that "it's a shared experience."
Nobody in the group is originally from Monroe, said Fey, "so we don't have close family around."
That makes the reading group "like a family," he said. "The Frantzes are sort of the grandparents."
* * *
On a Sunday in late May, eight members of the reading group got together at member Lori Sutherland's home in Monroe. They shared Cuban red beans and rice, salad greens from a member's garden, rhubarb crisp, big Mason jars of fresh-squeezed lemonade and a bottle of wine.
After dinner, they gathered in the living room to take turns reading "Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crashing Thunder," the life story of a Winnebago woman born near Black River Falls in 1884, as told to author Nancy Lurie.
Open windows let in the cool evening breeze. All was quiet at the back patio of Papa Don's Horseshoe Saloon across the yard from Sutherland's backdoor. From a distance, the faint roar of ATVs or motorcycles came through the windows.
Socks and Boots, the resident cats, slinked between legs and worked the room for chin rubs. Mary Frantz knitted.
The reading group is not a passive audience. Interjections, opinions and questions were common.
"Good heavens!"
"So somebody's name is Thunder Suddenly Among Us?"
"Doesn't this sound like "Trip to Bountiful'?"
"How would you pull a house?" ("Flatbed.")
"Where are they getting all the peyote? Doesn't that originate in the Southwest?"
"Did you just make that up?"
Fey kept the group on their toes by improvising a short addition to a chapter, something about a flying nun, and when everyone caught on, he admitted he was inspired by another book he's reading that he found at the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store and picked up because it "sounded interesting."
He estimates the group has read at least 200 books over the years, from American classics to UFO narratives to travelogues. John Steinbeck has been popular, as was Simon Winchester's "The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary."
"We're all open-minded," said Mary Frantz, but, she added, "everyone has absolute veto power."
If a book is boring everyone, "sometimes we finish, and sometimes we skip to the end," she said.
Reading together has benefits. The group acts as a living dictionary. Between the members, there are speakers of Hebrew, Spanish and French who can help with translation and pronunciation. ("We need a Klingon expert," Holland joked.)
Reading out loud also forces a slower pace, expanding time for contemplation and engaging the reader and listener in the story and physicality of the language.
"The House of the Seven Gables," Nathaniel Hawthorne's Gothic novel from the mid-1800s, was "physically difficult" to read and made the muscles around the mouth ache, Holland said.
That's it: read.
In a way, it's the anti-book club. There's no theme, no genre focus, no moderator, no list of discussion questions and no pressure. Members takes turns picking the book, then they read out loud to one another for an hour and a half after a potluck dinner. It's called, simply, "the reading group."
"Don Quixote" took them nearly two years.
Suzann Holland, director of Monroe Public Library and the group's newest member, remembers her confusion at the first meeting. She'd been told the group was reading Thornton Wilder's "Theophilus North."
"I hurried and read it, and then I got here - and they were reading it," she said.
* * *
Members have come and gone through the years, but the core group of founders from the 1970s is still hooked four decades later on this slow-paced, communal style of consuming literature.
Tom Fey, Barbara Woodriff and her then-husband were neighbors when they started getting together on Sunday evenings in 1974 to read out loud. At first, they'd just snack on popcorn and cereal as they went.
"It was kind of like Sunday night radio," Woodriff said.
When husband and wife John and Mary Frantz joined a few years later, they formalized things by instituting a potluck supper to precede the reading. Even then, the Frantzes were the elders of the group. Now both 92 years old, they've since retired from careers as physicians at Monroe Clinic and moved to downtown Madison to live in a retirement community, but they still come back to Monroe on Sunday evenings.
The reading group is "something to look forward to on Sundays instead of that sinking feeling" of another work week ahead, said Mary Frantz.
Her husband calls the reading group a "quasi-religious secular support group."
The group just enjoys reading together. Cathy Goray, a member with her husband John for nine years, likes that "it's a shared experience."
Nobody in the group is originally from Monroe, said Fey, "so we don't have close family around."
That makes the reading group "like a family," he said. "The Frantzes are sort of the grandparents."
* * *
On a Sunday in late May, eight members of the reading group got together at member Lori Sutherland's home in Monroe. They shared Cuban red beans and rice, salad greens from a member's garden, rhubarb crisp, big Mason jars of fresh-squeezed lemonade and a bottle of wine.
After dinner, they gathered in the living room to take turns reading "Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crashing Thunder," the life story of a Winnebago woman born near Black River Falls in 1884, as told to author Nancy Lurie.
Open windows let in the cool evening breeze. All was quiet at the back patio of Papa Don's Horseshoe Saloon across the yard from Sutherland's backdoor. From a distance, the faint roar of ATVs or motorcycles came through the windows.
Socks and Boots, the resident cats, slinked between legs and worked the room for chin rubs. Mary Frantz knitted.
The reading group is not a passive audience. Interjections, opinions and questions were common.
"Good heavens!"
"So somebody's name is Thunder Suddenly Among Us?"
"Doesn't this sound like "Trip to Bountiful'?"
"How would you pull a house?" ("Flatbed.")
"Where are they getting all the peyote? Doesn't that originate in the Southwest?"
"Did you just make that up?"
Fey kept the group on their toes by improvising a short addition to a chapter, something about a flying nun, and when everyone caught on, he admitted he was inspired by another book he's reading that he found at the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store and picked up because it "sounded interesting."
He estimates the group has read at least 200 books over the years, from American classics to UFO narratives to travelogues. John Steinbeck has been popular, as was Simon Winchester's "The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary."
"We're all open-minded," said Mary Frantz, but, she added, "everyone has absolute veto power."
If a book is boring everyone, "sometimes we finish, and sometimes we skip to the end," she said.
Reading together has benefits. The group acts as a living dictionary. Between the members, there are speakers of Hebrew, Spanish and French who can help with translation and pronunciation. ("We need a Klingon expert," Holland joked.)
Reading out loud also forces a slower pace, expanding time for contemplation and engaging the reader and listener in the story and physicality of the language.
"The House of the Seven Gables," Nathaniel Hawthorne's Gothic novel from the mid-1800s, was "physically difficult" to read and made the muscles around the mouth ache, Holland said.