“She’s an avid sponge of culture and literature.” “She’s just this wealth of information,” says book club member Natalie Lerner, a visual artist in Brooklyn. That’s really what it’s all about,” she says with a laugh. For years, her friends looked to her for book recommendations across multiple genres. Starting a book club came naturally to Johnson, who works at Los Angeles’s Silver Lake Branch Library. Johnson says there’s interest in Zoom meetings, but she hasn’t gone there yet.

When the conversation is at its peak, messages number in the triple digits, but the largely Gen Z and millennial members easily handle the banter that older readers might consider overwhelming, scrolling at their leisure and ignoring the chatter when they have to. There is no schedule, with members chatting whenever they have time-or whenever they finish reading the book, for those avoiding spoilers. They discuss titles like Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter and Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession over direct message on Twitter, sharing insights, excerpts, and the occasional pet picture. Two and a half years later, Johnson’s still-unnamed book club has grown to 49 members. “We were all pretty fed up by that point, going stir-crazy, and so it became a fun thing, a way to connect with people and talk to more people about books,” says Johnson. This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday. It was eight months into California’s shelter-in-place order, and Johnson, a Los Angeles librarian, decided to start a book club she describes as her “pandemic boredom project.” Admittedly, the book is filled with flawed, even despicable characters (Guillaume can choke), but like… c’mon, I got totally blindsided.In the fall of 2020, Alana May Johnson was looking for something to do. I get that Giovanni’s Room revolves around the tragic romance between him and David (the MC), and I do think what happens to him in the end is horrible, but his misogynistic ideas were personally a HUGE turn-off. “Oh, well, … these absurd women running around today, full of ideas and nonsense, and thinking themselves equal to men… they need to be beaten half to death so that they can find out who rules the world.” But most of the time- most of the time make love only with the body.”

That hasn’t stopped me from making love to many and loving one or two. I perhaps don’t like women very much, that is true. They are tempting like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know?- and they can be that shallow. “Oh women! There is no need, thank heaven, to have an opinion about women.

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