Inside a 32-Year-Old Book Club

Founded by two lawyers in 1991, Dick's Book Group (or Jonathan's Book Group, depending on who you ask) still meets every month.

Don Porterfield, Phyllis Blow, Steve Blow, Jonathan Feinberg, Dick King, Judy Halstead, Jackie Jerry, Frank Robinson and Bill Bortis.

On Tuesday evening, I crashed a book club meeting.

The gathering (which I later learned was referred to as a book “group”—not “club”—in an effort to be open and welcoming) was at the Albany home of Frank Robinson, a retired lawyer and judge who has authored eight books of his own and now writes a wildly interesting blog called The Rational Optimist. When I asked the a few of the members what makes their particular book group unique, Frank piped up: “We’re very smart.”

While Frank said it as a joke, I had already gathered that “very smart” is an understatement. For one, the group is comprised mostly of retired lawyers. For another, those retired lawyers have been reading a book a month, and then meeting up to have intellectual discussions about them, for the last three decades. That’s 360 books…Unless you’re founding member Dick King, who reads about five books for every one book the book group reads—or 60 books a year.

“What was attractive about Jonathan was that he was incredibly well read,” said Judy Halstead, a retired Skidmore professor who considers herself one of the “newer” members, having joined when she started dating Jonathan Feinberg, the other founder of the book group, in the late 1990s. “I brought my kids, and he brought book group to the relationship.”

But let’s back up. The year was 1991, and friends Dick and Jonathan had an idea. “We were reading so many books, and we’d see each other at the Writer’s Institute every year,” Dick explained.

“And you were both single,” Judy chimed in.

So Dick and Jonathan invited two women to meet them at a bar to discuss a book: Setting Free the Bears, a novel by John Irving.

“The two woman did not appear,” Dick said. “I think it was more about us than the book.”

But despite being stood up, a union was still formed. Over the years, the book group—which Jonathan calls Dick’s Book Group and Dick calls Jonathan’s Book Group—grew. Today, there are about 12 members who rotate hosting the monthly meeting, which consists of discussion over appetizers and then dinner.

A copy of Demon Copperhead, the book group’s November read.

On Tuesday at Frank’s, the discussion was about Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a co-recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction inspired by Charles Dickens’ 1850 novel David Copperfield. Once the last two members arrived, Don Porterfield put me on the spot. “What did you think of the book?” (Yes, I did come prepared.)

Those who know me know that I probably seemed out of place sitting in Frank’s living room; I was born five years after Dick and Jonathan’s Book Group was formed, and probably brought the average age of the group down a decade or so. But those who know me well know that I’m a staunch believer that your friends don’t have to be the same age as you, and that I often find myself in social situations where I’m the youngest by several decades (as I was when I invited myself to the book group meeting in question over drinks with Dick, whom I met at this fall’s PLAN for the Future event). So despite the fact that 1) I did not go to law school and 2) I have read far fewer books than anyone in that room, I gave my glowing review of the book, and even chimed in a few times throughout the discussion. (Of course, I’m still terrified to have nine avid readers who have a much better grasp on the English language than I do read this very story.)

The discussion ranged from the parallels between Demon Copperhead and David Copperfield to tangents on the failures of the foster care system and the impact of the opioid epidemic, two main themes of the book. Eventually, conversation shifted to picking the books for the next few months, a process that Dick describes as a “corrupt democracy,” with people trading votes and frequently disagreeing with one another. “Your presence is shaming us,” someone said to me as I observed a seemingly too-easy selection process. “We used to argue.”

Up next: Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, and Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. But as a reader myself, I wanted to know what books the group has read in the past that they’d recommend. I asked each of them to send in their five favorite books. Here’s the list:

• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

• A Sense of the World by Jason Roberts