The 4 AM Book Club No One Invited Me To
Last Tuesday at 4:07 in the morning, a sentence showed up in my head, possibly from a dream, possibly from the Agatha Christie on my nightstand, possibly from the fact of being 72 years old with a brain that no longer distinguishes between consciousness and whatever happens between midnight and dawn.
The sentence was: \"Nobody reads the same book twice, because nobody is the same person twice.\"
Written on a Post-it note in the dark, it turned up stuck to the counter next to the kettle by morning. My handwriting looked like a doctor's prescription written during an earthquake. Frank picked it up, squinted at it, and said, \"Is this a grocery list?\"
It was not a grocery list.
But it got me thinking about books, specifically what happens to them when you get older. Not the physical objects, though opinions about font sizes run strong in this household. The experience. The way a novel read at 35 lands completely differently at 72, like hearing a song you danced to in college and suddenly understanding the lyrics.
Thirty-four years of teaching English will do something to a person. The Great Gatsby has passed through my hands more times than anyone should read anything outside a sacred text. And reading after 70 is a different sport entirely: better, stranger, occasionally so moving you have to put the book down and sit with it in a quiet kitchen while the coffee brews.
Why Books Hit Different After 70
The Great Gatsby went out to juniors at New Trier for eighteen years. Eighteen. The green light passage lived in my bones, and once, during a faculty meeting in 2007 that had gone on too long, it may have slipped out in my sleep.
At 35, Gatsby was a cautionary tale about obsession and the American Dream. My students wrote essays about symbolism. Those essays? Thirty thousand of them over a career, and a thesis statement plagiarized from SparkNotes was visible at forty paces. (Ask me how I know.)
At 72, Gatsby came off the shelf on a spring afternoon and made me cry. Not about Gatsby. About Nick. About the way he watches everything fall apart and then goes home to the Midwest, which is what Midwesterners do when the party's over. Growing up in Evanston, moving to Scottsdale, living a whole life between those two places, Nick Carraway made sense at 72 in a way no room full of sixteen-year-olds could have received, no matter how many times the explanation came.
The thing about rereading: the book hasn't changed. You have. Your knees have changed. Your marriage has changed. The friends you've buried have changed you. And suddenly a line you highlighted in 1989 (\"So we beat on, boats against the current\") isn't about ambition anymore. It's about stubbornness. It's about still getting up at 4 AM because your body decided that's morning now, making tea, reading one more chapter because what else are you going to do with this strange, borrowed, ridiculous time.
The Zoom Book Club: 22 Years and Counting
The same book club has been meeting for 22 years. We started in Wilmette in 2004: eight women, a rotating living room, and a mutual agreement the wine was at least as important as the book. We read The Kite Runner at Gail's house and nobody talked about The Kite Runner for the first forty-five minutes because Gail had just learned her son was getting divorced and we had priorities.
We're on Zoom now. Seven of us are left. Barb moved to Florida. Diane's in the little box in the upper right corner with her cat, Muffin, who walks across her keyboard at least once per meeting and has accidentally voted on three book selections. We drink wine on camera. Somebody's always muted when they're trying to make a point. It's chaos and I love it.
Twenty-two years of book club have taught me this: nobody actually finishes the book every month. Our completion rate runs about 60%, and that's generous. Marcy once showed up and said, \"I read the first chapter and the last chapter and I feel confident I got the gist.\" She was not wrong. It was a James Patterson.
But the book is really just the excuse. The actual function of a book club — and this comes from an English teacher who believes in books the way some people believe in vitamins — is to give seven women a reason to sit in a room together, or on a screen together, once a month and say what they're actually thinking. Husbands. Kids. The weird mole from last Thursday. Whether it's normal to wake up at 4 AM and feel relieved nobody needs anything from you. The books give us permission to be honest, because we can always pretend we're talking about a character.
Books Worth Losing Sleep Over
A numbered list of ten books with little blurbs underneath is not happening here, because those lists are everywhere and they're all the same and nobody has ever read one and thought, \"Yes, The Alchemist, what a fresh recommendation.\" Thirty-four years of teaching teenagers means knowing when someone's phoning it in.
Instead, the books that have kept me up past my already-ridiculous bedtime in the last few years, and why.
Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. Read at 64, liked. Reread at 71, and it rearranged something in my chest. Olive is rude and difficult and desperately lonely and so precisely observed the book kept landing facedown on my lap while I stared out the window. She reminded me of my mother Dorothy, who could cut you with a sentence and then make you the best pot roast you ever had. If you've ever loved someone who was hard to love, read this book. Then read Olive, Again. Then sit quietly for a while.
Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove. Yes, everyone recommends this one and for once everyone is right. Ove is a grumpy retired man who thinks the world has gotten stupid — Frank identified with this immediately, though Frank won't read fiction. A known and documented fact about Frank Sinclair. The plot of Ove got relayed to Frank during golf on television. He said, \"Sounds like a good guy.\" A rave review from Frank.
Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow. A man confined to a single hotel for decades makes a full, rich, beautiful life inside those walls. Reading it the year after we moved to Scottsdale, when retirement and all its unexpected strangeness were still fresh, one thought kept surfacing: you don't need a bigger world. You need better attention.
Ann Patchett's The Dutch House. A novel about a house and the people who can't let it go. Carrie, my daughter the interior designer, called after reading it and said, \"Mom, this is us and the Wilmette house.\" My response: \"It is absolutely not.\" It absolutely was.
Tara Westover's Educated. Not fiction. Four people in book club have gotten this recommendation and all four came back shaken. A lifetime spent in education — grading papers, nudging reluctant readers, watching kids figure out a book can change the shape of their thinking — makes Educated land as both gratitude and fury. Read it.
The 4 AM Reading Hour
Can we talk about the best-kept secret of aging? The early morning reading hour.
Most mornings mean waking up between 3:45 and 4:15. Fighting it was the first approach: breathing exercises found online, counting backward from a hundred, listening to Frank's breathing, which is not quite snoring but is absolutely not silence either. Nothing worked. So the fighting stopped.
Now: tea (not coffee, because 4 AM is a different country with different rules), the kitchen counter, just the stove light on. No phone, no email, no Zoom — just me and whatever's in the middle of being read, which last week was a mystery novel so implausible the only reason to keep going was to see how badly the author would land the ending. (Badly. Very badly. Enjoyed every page!)
Those hours belong to me in a way nothing else does. Frank is asleep. The neighborhood is dark. The coyotes are doing whatever coyotes do at 4 AM, which based on the sounds is either hunting or having a disagreement about property lines. And the reading continues, keeping the brain working in a way the research on cognitive health actually supports. Reading ranks among the best things you can do for your mind as you age, right up there with crafts and creative hobbies and learning new skills. But the motivation isn't neurological. It's the only time of day when the person before wife, before mother, before retired teacher shows up again.
A reader. Still a reader.
Frank Doesn't Read Fiction (and What to Do About It)
The Frank situation needs addressing.
Frank Sinclair, 47 years married to me, has read approximately 200 nonfiction books about engineering, military history, and golf course design. Novels: zero. They sit on his nightstand untouched like little rectangular monuments to my optimism.
A Man Called Ove became a coaster.
The Old Man and the Sea. One hundred twenty-seven pages, Frank. Hemingway wrote it for people exactly like you. His response: \"I don't need to read about fishing. I've been fishing.\"
Acceptance of this trait is... ongoing. My former colleague Donna Wieczorek, who taught next door at New Trier for twelve years, told me on our Sunday phone call: \"You can't make someone love books, Victoria. You can only make them feel guilty about not loving books, and you've been doing that for decades.\" Donna teaches me things. She always has.
But for anyone living with non-readers: audiobooks. Frank listened to Killers of the Flower Moon on a drive to Sedona and actually said, \"That was interesting.\" Nearly drove off the road! He's now listened to three David Grann books. He still won't call it reading. Good enough.
The Novel in the Nightstand
A Word document on my laptop called \"Chapter1_FINAL_v3.doc\" runs to 41 pages — a novel started in 2017 about a retired teacher in the Midwest who reconnects with a former student. Not autobiographical. Sure.
Once a year, the file opens. A few sentences change. The 4 AM dark, the tea, and the question: Is this good? No idea. Genuinely.
Frank doesn't know. The kids don't know. Book club found out after two glasses of Pinot Noir. Gail said, \"Finish it.\" Diane said, \"You have to finish it.\" The answer was, \"I will,\" which is what comes out every year.
What nobody tells you about a lifetime of reading: eventually, you want to write. The file stays open the way some people keep a candle lit. Not because it lights the room. Because it's proof something is still burning.
Back to the Post-It
That 4 AM sentence, \"Nobody reads the same book twice, because nobody is the same person twice,\" turns out to be mangled Heraclitus. Should have remembered, what with the master's degree, though DePaul was a long time ago.
The mangled version is better. Anyone who reread a book at 70 and thought, How did I miss that? You didn't miss it. You weren't ready.
Find a book you loved twenty years ago. Read it again at 4 AM with tea. And if 41 pages of something sit on your laptop — keep going. The book doesn't care if you're 72.
Time to go change a few sentences. Don't judge me.
