The Smith Club Book Club generally focuses on fiction and non-fiction books authored by or written about Smith women. Everyone is welcome, whether you’ve read the book or not. The conversations are always illuminating, convivial and wide-ranging.
The Smith Club Book Club meets at 2:00 pm on Sunday of every other month. Starting in 2020, we began meeting over Zoom and continue to gather virtually to include Smithies from across Colorado and Wyoming. Contact smithclubco@gmail.com to get on the book club email list.
The next book club meeting will be on Sunday, March 26 at 2:00 pm. We’ll be discussing A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara ’95.
About A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara ’95
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome―but that will define his life forever.
In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.
Let us know if you’re interested in joining the Smith Club Book Club.
2023 Smith Club Book Club Dates and Selections
- January 29: We are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays by Samantha Irby
- March 26: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara ’95
- May 21: The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power by Pnina Lahav
- July 23
- September 17
- November 19
2022 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki ‘80
- Ms. Adventure: My Wild Explorations in Science, Lava, and Life by Jess Phoenix ‘05
- Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
- Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
- The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith ’67
- 48 Peaks, Hiking and Healing in the White Mountains by Cheryl Suchors ’72
2021 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- Untamed by Glennon Doyle
- America’s First Daughter by Stephanie Dray ’93 & Laura Kamoie
- The Body is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor
- The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free by Paulina Bren
- Band of Sisters by Lauren Willig
- Kindred by Octavia Butler
2020 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden
- The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern ’00
- Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
- American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson
- Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan ’03
- Julia Child: The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Julia Child ’34, Introduction by Helen Rosner ’04
2019 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
- Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster by Stephen Carter
- Kickdown: A Novel by Rebecca Clarren ’97
- The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine F. Weiss
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
- Becoming by Michelle Obama
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
2016 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman ’92
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern ’00
- Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family by Amy Ellis Nutt ’77
- The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara ’95
- Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis by Alice Kaplan