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Retirement Reflections
Sharing resident stories from Canterfield
Hosted by: Lee Martin & Carol Giusty (Juice-tea)
Produced by: Patric E.K. Bundrum
Music by: Parkcore
Retirement Reflections
The Book Club Leader
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Lee and Carol interview Shirley Klock discussing Canterfield's book club and their shared love of reading.
Welcome to Retirement Reflections. My name is Lee Martin. I'll be your co-host along with Carol Juicy. Welcome to episode two because last week was the one, the introduction. If you're listening, it's an episode that you'll be thrilled to hear. Carol, first of all, how's your how's your week been?
SPEAKER_02My week has been fine. It's been a challenge, let's just put it that way. And I'm okay right now.
SPEAKER_01I was almost late today because of traffic. On the fourth floor, all the rollators and all of the all all of the uh there's just a lot of traffic in the hallways here. Yes, there are. So seriously, though, introduce our guest if you would, please.
SPEAKER_02I want to introduce our book club leader, Shirley. And Shirley, will you tell me how to pronounce your last name? It's Clock, like TikTok. TikTok. But it begins with a K. Okay, Shirley Clock. All right. And you have been our book club leader for how long? Two plus years, I guess. Two. Okay. I'm a late joiner, and I have to say that I have enjoyed your book club. How did you start the book club?
SPEAKER_03Well, I didn't start book club. I joined book club after we moved in, and it was led by another resident. And she lived in the villas. So when she got books, I told her I would help her pass them out to the people in our building, which I did. What I didn't really realize was that I was being sucked in because she um trained. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Trained.
SPEAKER_03Uh, because she was actually planning on moving out, but she was still going to come to book clubs. So, long story short, I inherited book club and became the leader.
SPEAKER_01Well, and I'm a recent uh joiner. Joiner. Yes, I've joined it recently. You did really she's the only book club leader that I've known.
SPEAKER_03Well, she's really ever in my life, anywhere. Well, well, I'm number two in my life because this is only the second book club I've ever been in.
SPEAKER_02So this is the second book club I've ever been in, also, and I have enjoyed it. I it isn't easy to be a book club leader.
SPEAKER_01It's hard to say, much less.
SPEAKER_02Yes. I'm trying to be very key specific when I'm talking. When you took over the book club, what was your hope?
SPEAKER_03I'm not sure that I had any real defined plans. It was kind of like I well, I enjoy reading. And the book club people enjoy reading. And one of the things I've tried to do is encourage people to talk at book club, not just, I don't want to sit there and listen to myself talk for 45 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever it is, that I try to get people involved. And I'm sure you both have heard me say, it doesn't matter whether you read the book or not, just go to book club. I mean, some of the best discussions we've ever had were about books that people hated or didn't want to read for a specific reason. And book club tends to the subject matter tends to take off on itself.
SPEAKER_02One thing I noticed it was in the other book club that I also had been participating in. The book club leader will say, Well, how did you like the book? And people say, I liked it, and then the conversation stops. The book club leader says, Well, why did you like it? And then there is a long pause, and some people do not know why they like the book. And it has to be hard to um facilitate a discussion. And then there are others that you can't keep quiet.
SPEAKER_03That is absolutely true. I try to involve everybody, and occasionally I will call on somebody who hasn't been talking because other people have been talking, and I try to maybe draw everybody in because everybody has an opinion. Some people just don't say it out loud.
SPEAKER_01I have a question. The questions that you ask, you have them printed out and you're looking at them. Do you are those questions you come up on your own? It's a loaded question, is what I'm asking.
SPEAKER_03Well, I try to find a study guide for the books just because it gives you some kind of structure about themes and whatever. To be perfectly honest, I think a lot of the questions are really stupid in terms of lost in you know, deep theoretical something or other about this book. And I'm not sure I could ask you guys, I don't think our book club really cares. But I think there are, I think it's interesting. Sometimes when I read a book and knowing it's for book club, I'll write down a question because I try to get to people think outside the box. Like if this point in the story didn't happen, but it happened this other way, what do you think the story would have been? And then so you talk about the story and questions about characters, but a lot of times too, we'll talk about the way the author wrote the book, and that's sometimes why you like or don't like a book, is because of the style.
SPEAKER_01I've noticed in some of the books uh there are there are questions in the back of the book. I didn't know that because I never read that. I read where it says epilogue and I don't read that part, but in beyond that, some of the books actually have, I guess, book club questions in the back of them.
SPEAKER_03They do. I didn't realize that either.
SPEAKER_01It's kind of like a cheat sheet, I guess, you know.
SPEAKER_03Well, there are some people I think that read the endings first and then go back and read the book or don't read the book and just read the endings. I mean, it's kind of like when we were in school and you know, Cliff Notes and could you jump ahead?
SPEAKER_02Is it difficult to pick a book for a whole group of people?
SPEAKER_03Yes, because as you know, we were using Cop County Library, who has it book club kits where there's 12 books in the kit and you just rent it and you know, pick it up, whatever. I know I have certain stories that I enjoy, whether it's historical fiction or nonfiction or this or that or whatever, and everybody has their own style. Plus, Lee, you probably know, and Carol, you know, we have a lot of people in book club that read a lot. If I had to think of or try to get a book that nobody had read, it would never work because the ladies and gentlemen that are in our club read.
SPEAKER_01I'm the token gentleman.
SPEAKER_03You are okay. Um, otherwise I just would have said ladies, but I no kind of like it myself. It's hard to, you're never going to find something somebody hasn't read. So you just set that aside.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I had a book I found at Walmart the other day. And you know, if it's on the shelf at Walmart, I think it's current, you know. And so I thought, wow, here's a new book. And so I bought it and I read it, and I mentioned it in passing the other day in a book club. Out of six people that were there, I think five of them held their hand up. Yeah, oh yeah, we read that.
SPEAKER_02I know.
SPEAKER_01Yes. I had to go back and look at the at the copyright. It was in 2023.
SPEAKER_02So I thought, well, I guess it's not as new, but what I what I have found in uh in participating in a book clubs over the years, you have favorite authors. Do you have a favorite author that you like to read?
SPEAKER_03Not really. I've gone through some authors, like I read Patricia Cornwell. She does uh medical mystery. And when I first started to read her, I think I was somehow picked up book number seven or something like that. But I realized that although each book stands on its own, it also goes back to stories of characters that you don't know what happens, so you're kind of confused. So the point being, I went back and read book number one, and I have now read in succession all 43 of her books. Wow. So I'm, you know, probably tired of her by now. But I I like a lot of historical fiction. I like when there's history in there, and then the author at the end, you're talking about book club questions and stuff like that. I like when the author at the end of a book will tell you what's true and what they made up, because I think that just adds to the book, and then you learn the history at the same time.
SPEAKER_01I have my favorite author is Francine Rivers, and she used to be a romance novelist, and that was before she was a Christian. She became a Christian, and after that, she changed some of her style of writing from romance novels to novels that related to Bible characters. Now there's still a certain amount of romance in it, but it's not the same, it didn't lean that much. Hers is kind of the the Fabio kind of thing, gentlemen. Right. But uh in hers, notice that she doesn't tell it at the end, but she'd take like a usually character or a Bible story, and it will be pretty accurate as far as scripture goes, but she takes enough literary license that she adds to that personal things. Like, you know, if you talk about David when he met Goliath, you know, he had on this suit of armor. Well, then he'll go, she'll go into the color of it and the and the height. Well, that's that's not in the Bible, but she adds enough to it like that. So, like you say, when you finish, you realize, oh, I didn't know they came in that color. You know, and they're really good, you know, to add to it. Ellen likes to read uh uh Eugenia Price, right? And she does a lot of stories from uh Savannah, Georgia, and in that area, and a lot of it is very accurate.
SPEAKER_02Well, surely what you just said too, if you read book three of an author that is in a series, you don't know what happened in the first book. You need to know the character, so you have to almost go back.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's what Eugenia Price, and they'll they'll make a reference to something that happened in the past. And if it's important enough to be in book three, that means that book one or two was that was the story in that book, and then you understand the character. You understand the character.
SPEAKER_01Maybe there's a character in that first book that didn't show up in two, but that happens a lot, yeah.
SPEAKER_03That they come and go into the different books.
SPEAKER_02I like romance novels, whether it's fiction or historical fiction, but I like Cinderella stories. I know. No, I'm not I'm agreeing, actually. We kind of just to change up, I every now and then we'll get a mystery. But mysteries mean I have to wait till the end to find out what's happened. So I wait and wait, and I find all these different mystery, it's like a puzzle, and they're putting a puzzle together, and I think, oh come on, what happened?
SPEAKER_03Back to our book club. I try to encourage anybody that you know listens, I'll go, come join book club, you know, come show up. How many times did I say that to you, Lee, before you first came?
SPEAKER_01Several.
SPEAKER_03You know, I try to encourage everybody to come and you know why I finally came.
SPEAKER_01No, so because I don't read it. I get the audio book. I am not a good reader, I don't like to read, and uh, but I do like to know what's in a book. So I get the audio version of the book, and that way I can listen to it driving down the road while a policeman's giving me a ticket. I can listen, I can listen to it, you know, anywhere.
SPEAKER_03Well, I consider that still reading. I mean, in our book club, in the book kits, there were 12 books. Well, we have obviously one lady that is blind, so she listens to a book. We have two to three others that are visually impaired, so they listen to books. We have Yu Lee who likes to listen to a book. I read on my e-reader, as does one other person, so I don't have, quote, like a book in my hand. And then we have the people that actually like books still. So we have a big diverse kind of group reading. And I still think listening is reading. So I don't don't say you're not reading just because you're listening to a book.
SPEAKER_01Okay, well, I feel better now.
SPEAKER_02I know when I read, I get really, if it's good character development, I get really hung up on the psychological implications of the characters and how they interact. And I find that most people do not are not interested. So I try not to say too much in a book club because I find myself I'm probably very boring. Well, I'm thinking these are all psychology, and that's why some of the authors are so good, is that they see the psychology of the characters and they work into the book. But that's we all read a book differently, I think.
SPEAKER_01But you always bring out a good question to somewhere in book club or sometimes in just conversation around the table. You will always say, How does that make you feel? Oh, yes. That's a that's that psych psychology thing you. So, how many, how deep into the book do you have to get before you feel like this is something I want to read? First chapter, first paragraph?
SPEAKER_03I try not to give up on a book. And in the last, I and I try really, really, really hard not to give up on a book. There was a book we read in book club, it's called Midnight Library, that everybody here hated it. I actually liked it, but I also read the entire book. People gave up like after the first couple pages, I think in some cases. But I have where we lived before in independent living, there was a book club, and I was just part of it. And I gave up on two of the books. Well, no, I gave up on one book. The second book, I actually read the whole thing, but the author told the same story in like seven pages, just kept telling it over and over and over and over again. And I think I read the book just because I was waiting for something else to happen. Now, the book that I gave up totally on, I can't remember the name of it now, but it was just so boring that I just said, no, I can't do this. And I didn't read it.
SPEAKER_02That's you are hitting on authors and the way they write. I can understand. I have always wanted to write a book, and I have started probably three or four books. It is so hard, and it's character development.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_02It is amazing how difficult character development is. If you do not have good character development, you're not going to get the reader past about the third or fourth chapter.
SPEAKER_03If you're that lucky.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. No, I agree. One author. Danielle Steele. I have several of our books in our library here. Danielle Steele, you could read what she does well, is that she gets a character, and they're always the same. They're always beautiful, they're always rich, and they're always there's just something that we would all like to be. And then she gets a little storyline, but she carries it on and on, and you could skip probably 15, 20 pages every so often, and that's her style. But I like her because she has a good plot development, and that's what she's good at. She gets a good plot, and the characters are pretty much the same, and how they work through the story that she does, and that's what you white people read Danny O'Steele.
SPEAKER_03Oh, she's very successful, that's for sure.
SPEAKER_01Let me shift gears a minute and go back a little bit. Shirley, when you were growing up, did you like to read? Were you read to? I mean, or did you enter into the book club now just because you're bored by nothing else to do?
SPEAKER_03I I always like to read. Um, I grew up very small town, and one of the things that we look forward to is the bookmobile coming. Because we did not have, we had to drive out of town to go get groceries and go to the movie theater and go anywhere and do anything. So in my town, there was, I mean, it was literally one traffic light, we had a laundromat, we had one gas station.
SPEAKER_01Let's give a plug to the town.
SPEAKER_03It's called Manaway, Ohio. At its height, it's in northeast Ohio. At its height, it had 1,100 people in it. At current, it's around, I think, 800. But our school You should have never left. Well, that's true. Since some of my friends that I graduated with haven't. But our school system was consolidated. I read somewhere that because it was all F kids was busted. It was in the middle of farmland. It was at the a lot of potato fields, layers potato chips, they grew potatoes there and whatever. I don't know what they do now. But in any event, I read somewhere that they bust like our school district was like 60 miles of little crossroads put together, and pretty much everybody rode a bus.
SPEAKER_01But the bookmobile, what day did it come?
SPEAKER_03I want to say it came on a Saturday because ours came on Thursday.
SPEAKER_01We get to got to get out of class in the middle of I don't remember being allowed out of class.
SPEAKER_03Oh, it was so no, it was I think it was weekends because you remember any of those books that you checked out for the bookmobile? No, I just remembered you could get more than one. So, and then you know, you obviously went and took them back and got more.
SPEAKER_01I got Sherlock Holmes. Oh, get you. That's that's the one of the first books I remember uh having in my possession. I'm not going to say that I read it all, but I remember checking out Sherlock Holmes, you know, and getting to read read that.
SPEAKER_03Well, and when you were little, they didn't let you release the bookmobile where I was. If you were a little kid, they wouldn't let you go to the teenage section and you know get a book from there. You kind of had to stay within this, I think, age group of what somebody thought was appropriate.
SPEAKER_01So so did you uh as as a young child, did you were you in your home reading books rather than being whatever girls doing to go outside and play? I know what boys do, they go play baseball or something.
SPEAKER_03Well, in the small town that I grew up in, when you went outside, you just you could ride your bike and you didn't really have anywhere to go. Um, but around the block, which was in my case a circular road. So if you went around the block, you literally went around. And when you played outside, I played in in the woods. We did that in forts. We I mean there wasn't anything else to do with that.
SPEAKER_01You did that instead of sitting in the house reading a book.
SPEAKER_03In the summer, you were basically expected to go outside and play, be back by dinner. You know, you had your watch on, so you showed up for dinner at five o'clock. And there were times when I was playing, I would set my watch back just so I could still play.
SPEAKER_01You would run back in the house to say, oh, now I get to read chapter two.
SPEAKER_03No, I actually I remember reading more in my twenties, well, and probably late teenage, and I was a waitress and part-time job, and I'd come home, depending on the shift I worked, and I'd read for a while, and it'd be like if I get sucked into a story, it can be like two, three in the morning, and I'll look up from the book and go, Oh crap, I really need to go to bed. But I just yeah, you know, if I'm really engrossed in a book, I have no concept of what time it is. And now I just I read because I enjoy it, and there's I read, I don't know, two to three books a week and read a lot.
SPEAKER_02I remember discovering a library when I was probably in second grade, and I thought that was the most amazing thing that I could take out a book and take it home and read. And I must have been in that library so many times and taking different books out and being taught very early to take care of those books and make sure that you didn't fill on them or you were really very conscientious about how taking care of books.
SPEAKER_03My mom was a reader, so that's probably why I read a lot too. She she enjoyed reading.
SPEAKER_01Carol, I know you have, I think you said 18 more questions to ask, but let's do this and keep up with some time here. Come up with maybe two other good questions you've got.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think we have covered a lot of the I'm curious as to what you think of. I'm still on this author thing. What do you think of the authors like John Grisham? They spit out these books over and over and over, and but you get hooked on them.
SPEAKER_03Well, I think a good author is a good author, so they're probably successful. With John Grisham as an example, I think that after a while his books just got too predictable for me in terms of it was the same story over and over. But what he's done is he's had, and I don't know how when he started doing this, people co-write with him. And I think some of his books that I've read recently are better because of the co author that it improved the story.
SPEAKER_02James Patterson has done that too.
SPEAKER_03Right. Yeah, they both have. And so, you know, there are favorite books and and favorite authors, but yeah, if if you just keep writing the same story over and over, that to me gets boring. And I look around for somebody else to read. And then you have
SPEAKER_01Famous people too that basically tell the story to the person that really writes it. I can't believe it's some of our politicians, you know, that this book is written by a so-and-so politician, and then it's has like a co-author or something.
SPEAKER_03It's probably the other way around.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. My thinking is they probably told the story, and then the guy that or the lady that knew how to write it, she actually was the author of it.
SPEAKER_03Like the, I think it's James Patterson. He wrote a book with Bill Clinton, and it was a politically based kind of book about a president and his family. It wasn't based on Bill Clinton, but it was one of the better, I thought, for the most recent James Patterson books that was written. The story was really well done and it was believable and it was it was really interesting.
SPEAKER_02Well, I've covered a lot of our questions here. We've covered the favorite authors and uh how you got into this.
SPEAKER_03Can I encourage everybody to come to Book Club?
SPEAKER_01Please do.
SPEAKER_03Yes. We meet on the second Tuesday of the month at four o'clock in the library. And even if you have not read the book, I encourage everyone to show up. And what I'm putting together now, and we when we're talking before about the library, we kind of got to the point with the lists of book kits available that we've really over three years exhausted their list. They don't add new books that often. So what we have switched to is I've asked everybody in the book club to suggest a book to read, whether it's their favorites, it's something they want to read. You don't have to necessarily have read it yet. You might have just heard about it and thought, well, that sounds fun. And give me the list, and I'm putting together list of July, August, September, the whole calendar year, and it will publish in advance what book we're going to read what month. So that way it gives people extra time to get a book or know when something is going to be read. And I'm putting that list together now. I was waiting for some people to give me their ideas. Some people have given me a list that has 20 books on it, and some people I've been trying to get one book out of them.
SPEAKER_01So well, this has been fun, and I think we've uh, like you say, exhausted most of the questions. We probably could ask more, but we're not. We're going to end at this, you know. And I this has been fun. Surely, as being our first victim.
SPEAKER_03Thank you. I didn't realize.
SPEAKER_01Really, I think I think we did well. I think you did well. You're very interesting. We heard things about the book club that I didn't know. The only book club I ever knew about was these group of ladies that got together and they read a book about personal finances. And then they all got together and pooled all their money and made some big investments. And it became so popular that then there was a series of books about these ladies that did that. Of course, that was interesting to me, but I didn't know anybody that had enough money that wanted to get together with me and do that. Anyway, I digress. Thank you for being here. And Carol, I guess unless you've got something else you can think of.
SPEAKER_00I'm done. Hi, Patrick Bundram here. Retirement Reflections is a small startup podcast that we hope will share our community stories with family, friends, and anyone else who wants to listen. Despite being produced at Canterfield of Kennesaw, the opinions of our hosts and guests do not reflect the company's official policies and procedures. We hope you'll stick around to see what stories we have to share. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you next week.