Some good news for your Monday. "The decline [of physical bookstores] actually ended years ago, and the latest numbers from the American Booksellers Association show independent stores expanding at a pace not seen this century." https://www.kpbs.org/news/arts-culture/2026/05/28/independent-bookstores-are-multiplying-find-booksellers-in-your-community

SPOILERS!! This summary contains spoilers for Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Don't read this if you want to avoid them. @Adrienne Crowley used Granola to capture a summary of our conversation. I think it did a better job that the Zoom AI. This is a condensed version of those notes. If you've read the book, feel free to share your thoughts on anything! - The group was sharply divided on Natalie: some found her unbearable almost immediately, while others saw her as tragic, naive, and shaped by fundamentalist upbringing, low self-esteem, and social media pressure. - Several people felt Natalie’s unraveling was psychologically legible, but Caleb’s transformation was much less convincing. His long-term complicity, abuse, and commitment to the 1855 setup felt underexplained. - The 1855 twist landed strongly at first, but the more the group unpacked it, the more plot holes emerged — especially around hiding from the law, staying nearby, Natalie’s memory gap, and whether the setup could really hold for so many years. - Clementine’s long delay in intervening was one of the biggest unanswered questions. Even with the explanation that she wasn’t believed at first, people still struggled to understand why no one stepped in sooner. - The group had a nuanced discussion about religion, gender roles, and fundamentalism. Most felt the book critiques rigidity, performance, and harmful systems more than any one denomination, though they could understand why some Christian readers might feel attacked. - The social media thread resonated strongly: the group talked about curated identity, trolls, praise, parasocial audiences, and how the split between “online Natalie” and real Natalie helped drive her collapse. - Reactions to the Anne Hathaway adaptation were mixed. People were skeptical of the casting and curious how the fragmented time structure and twist would translate to screen. - Overall, the group agreed the book was compelling, well written, and rich in ideas, even if some of the plot mechanics felt shaky on closer inspection.

At some point, we'll have to decide how to choose the book for our group reads, but this time around, we'll just do a poll to choose from three possibilities. I avoided new books to make it easier for people to get their hands on them in time. And I'll allow 6 weeks to get the book and read it. So we'll meet mid-July. The descriptions are from the back of the books and the links are for more info. Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald Innocence is set in the 1950s, when Italy was picking up the pieces after the war. Chiara Ridolfi is the guileless daughter of a decrepit Italian family. Barney is her practical English girlfriend, who can sum up a man, she says, in one firm hand-grip. Salvatore is a penniless doctor from the south, who thinks he is proof against politics, social conscience and tenderness. Chiara’s cousin, Cesare, says very little, which gives him time to think… https://britishauthors.co.uk/books/innocence-34380/ The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore’s powerful novel, set on a Bengali noble’s estate in 1908, is both a love story and a novel of political awakening. The central character, Bimala, is torn between the duties owned to her husband, Nikhil, and the demands made on her by the radical leader Sandip. Her attempts to resolve the irreconcilable pressures of the home and the world reflect the conflict in India itself, and the tragic outcome foreshadows the unrest that accompanied partition is 1947. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7166 (free download of the book!) On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton At home they are just sisters, but onstage, they are the Salvations. Ruth, Esther, and Chloe have been singing and dancing in harmony since they could speak, and have become a bona fide girl group whose shows are the talk of their San Francisco neighbourhood. Thanks to the rigorous direction of their mother, Vivian, the Salvations find themselves with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that could catapult them into the national spotlight. But sometime between the hours of meticulous rehearsal on their rooftop and the weekly gigs at the Champagne Supper Club, the sisters’ lives start to evolve — and soon they must face changes that threaten to splinter the community, the Salvations, and even the family.

Although I enjoyed Yesteryear (Caro Claire Burke) and The Book of Goose (Yiyun Li), my favourite was The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn. Here's my review of The Whalebone Theatre. What was your favourite book you read in May?

We had a fun Zoom discussion of Yesteryear by Claire Caro Burke, our first group read! Thank you to everyone who came. I appreciate you! 🧡 Once it's processed, I'll post the AI summary of the discussion so others can join in the conversation. In the meantime, what are you reading this weekend? I'm still reading The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li.