Well Read

A little over a year ago, after attending other book groups at her women’s club in Hartford, Connecticut, Priscilla “Polly” Larson Huntington ’60 had an idea for a more “unconventional” gathering.

The book group she advertised in the Town and Country Club newsletter invited members to meet over lunch and discuss any books they had read recently and share recommendations with fellow attendees.

“I just wanted to talk about books and get ideas of what people were reading,” Huntington says.

Huntington has always been a big reader, often reading 40 to 50 titles a year. “I can remember sitting in the Quita Woodward room in the Old Library and reading my first John Updike book.”

It was in the same Bryn Mawr spirit of sharing knowledge and ideas that she formed her book group. The group includes upwards of 24 people who share what they have been reading (or listening to) lately. The conversations that emerge run the gamut from AI to bookstores in the area.

The book recommendations, which Huntington compiles and emails to the group afterward, go beyond the bestseller list; one person recommended a book on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by a professor at nearby Trinity College.

“I think you get such a wide range of topics when you have different books — everything from science fiction to Henry James,” she says.

One of Huntington’s recent favorites was Amy Reading’s The World She Edited about Katharine S. White, New Yorker editor and Bryn Mawr class of 1914.

“The group works because books are personal,” Huntington says. “There is always a surge of delight when someone mentions a book that you also have loved, and we can’t be ‘required and fined’ for not reading a book!”