It used to be my great good fortune to be part of a women's reading group. The group was in existence for seven or eight years (did any of us picture it lasting so long?), and being a member was one of the continuing pleasures of my life.

Our group consisted of seven women who range in age from their 30s to their 50s. We were teachers, a homemaker, a small business owner, a writer, and a lawyer. We saw each other through the birth of four children, sundry family traumas, and the making of a documentary film on women who built glider planes during World War II. We shared secrets and confidences and we laughed and laughed and laughed. We also read some great books.

It was a struggle from the start to decide what the thrust of our reading list should be. Since we were a group of females, did we want to stick only with female authors? Should we try to do the classics alone, or alternate The Canon with modern works? It was rather catch as catch can, now that I think about it, but for the most part, we enjoyed reading the books and enjoyed even more discussing their merits and failures.

The first book we read was Rosellen Brown's Before and After. This tale of parental despair at the very striking downfall of a child was interesting on its own, but almost more so for the reactions from the group. The several of us who did not, at that point, have children of our own, felt out of step with the members who spoke movingly of how they felt the grief of the fictional parents. I have often thought that I should go back and reread it now that I have two children of my own.

The only book we all universally hated was Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. Despite the fact that famed editor Maxwell Perkins took on this behemoth, we all felt that it was overwritten and long-winded. Never mind the fact that the book was, simply, very dull. Other books we had read that were mostly disliked had at least one or two champions in our midst, but we all left Look Homeward, Angel on the floor like so much smelly garbage. It was a lesson in how tastes change, if nothing else.

We read Middlemarch (well, some of us did). We read Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (one of my favorites, and my suggestion to begin with). We skipped through Stevenson's Treasure Island, all loving it, and all decrying the fact that we'd never read it as children (was it really only a boys' book?). Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety was an elegant little tome, and David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars educated us all to the plight of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Anne Tyler, Laurie Colwin, Barbara Kingsolver, and many others lit our meetings with their wit, imagination, and wonderful abilities with their ability to knit such believable plots.

As the mother of two young children (not to mention everything else I'm involved in), I often felt fortunate if I could manage to get to my personal mail within a week after it arrived, much less read books. They seem such an extravagance, somehow, even though reading for me is practically a requirement; I feel that I need it like I need food and air and sleep. So the reading group made me work, which I sometimes resented -- I tried to balance what I needed to get done with what I needed to keep myself attuned to the interior, emotional world of books.

I am not alone in loving to read, and one of the things I dearly love to read is a cookbook. I will take a cookbook to bed as easily as a novel, and enjoy it just as much (albeit differently). The choice of recipes, the items listed in the batterie de cuisine, the techniques explained or not -- all this is instructive not only in its own right, but in terms of seeing the author behind the kitchen scrim. Why does each author feel compelled to explain some things in painstaking detail and other things not at all? What do the recipes say about the author's likes and dislikes (or about the author's allergies, painful childhood memories, or senseless prejudice against perfectly innocent rutabagas)? How does the arrangement of the recipes (are they seasonally ordered, or done according to the salad/main course/dessert line of thinking) reflect the author's priorities? There is just as much to question and ponder when faced with a cookbook as there is when deep in a novel.

The reading group dissolved eventually. My regret mingled with relief, as I was well over an hour away from the rest of the group and making the meetings was sometimes difficult. I think about my reading group often, and always when I'm reading. I wondered what the others would have thought of The Five Red Herrings (a Dorothy Sayers mystery with a fabulous plot and practically unreadable Scots accents) and the difficult-to-read The Rape of Nanking (an Iris Chang history of the 1937 invasion of Nanking by the Japanese army). I think of Suzanne, with her sarcasm and her bright penny laugh -- of Rosann with her sunny cheer and optimism -- of Susan, with her cerebral, teacherly approach and her delicious enjoyment of the rest of us. Time well-spent indeed.

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