Our MAM Board has purchased a year’s supply of Zoom. Book Club was the first group to try out this remote meeting application. I was nervous about hosting a Zoom meeting, but it actually went quite smoothly. Any questions I had were easily resolved on the Zoom web site. I was able to record the meeting and have it stored to the Zoom cloud, so was pleased about that.

Peggy and Barbara were able to figure out how to click on the link I emailed and join the meeting. It was swell seeing their faces once again. The nice thing about Zoom is that Barbara was able to join us from Virginia, where she is helping to care for a sick friend. Two other members said they would join in but were no-shows. The remainder of the regulars did not reply to the Zoom invitation, perhaps because they only had a half-day’s notice.

I expected to hear about many books having been read, but that was not the case. Both Peggy and Barbara said they had a hard time focusing on reading during the lockdown and thus had little to report, whereas I found it a great opportunity to get even more reading done. (26 books. 8773 pages since 1 April).

Books I found particularly interesting were:
The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever, by Kent Garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth
Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, by Robert L. O’Connell
A Man, by Keiichirō Hirano
Nickel Mountain, by John Gardner

For August. I will get the invitation mailed out several days in advance. If you would like to join us on Zoom, please email me and I’ll add you to the invitation list. ~Brad Lucht