Book Club

Sunday, February 24, 2019
2:00 pm
The BookBar
4280 Tennyson St, Denver, CO 80212

Our book selection for February is The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. 

About The Interestings 

The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.

Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.

Wolitzer studied creative writing at Smith College and graduated from Brown University in 1981.

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Let us know if you’re interested in joining the Smith Club Book Club. 

The Smith Club Book Club meets on the fourth Sunday of the month (with some exceptions) at 2:00 pm on a bi-monthly schedule. Meetings are held at the BookBar in North Denver’s Tennyson District. The Book Club focuses on books (fiction and non-fiction) written by or about Smith women.

2019 Smith Club Book Club Dates

• February 24
• April 28
• June 23
• August 25
• October 27
• December 22

2018 Smith Club Book Club Selections

• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
• The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel Davis Huber ’73
• Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction by Mary Ellen Hannibal ’81
• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
• The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
• My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

2017 Smith Club Book Club Selections

• A Spoonful of Sugar by Amanda Orr ’90
• Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi ’92
• My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem ’56
• Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper ’96
• Terrible Virtue by Ellen Feldman (Bryn Mawr College ’64, MA ’67).
• The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez