Women Weaving A Tale of Their Own

The first years were tenuous. Attendance was not always high. Not every book got read. One of the original 10 members moved away. But as the years went on and meetings passed month by month, an unusual closeness developed.

"You need to have something for yourself," Holton said.

They started holding an out-of-town trip each year, first a weekend at Virginia Beach, then the yearly excursion to Wintergreen, a resort in the mountains west of Charlottesville.

They now meet every month except December and hold a summer pool party and a fall potluck with their families. Once a year, they return to Geldzahler's cabin, accessible off a long, steep, winding dirt road tucked behind a vineyard, where they choose books for the year.

"There's a rare resilience to this," Carney said. "It's partly shared history, and it's partly that it's so comfortable."

They have shared milestones. The book club is mother to 23 children, three of them born since the group's formation, including the youngest of Kaine and Holton's three children. Parents have aged; four have died. Children have been shepherded through tough middle school years. The oldest are tackling college applications.

There was the time Geldzahler's brother was injured on the job and spent months in a Charlottesville hospital recovering. The group drove 70 miles west to deliver a massive basket of food to the family.

"I didn't do anything for five months but sit in the hospital," she said. "Except this. I came to this."

In this group, it is the books that take precedence. Their selection process takes hours, involving passionate arguing and a coffee table covered with dozens of paperbacks nominated by each woman.

They write titles on butcher paper and tape them to the cabin's floor-to-ceiling windows, which look out on the steep, wooded hillside. They try to balance fiction with nonfiction, harder books with easier reads, classics and modern hits. They choose a biography every year. It took Joy and Gail Casselton, a guidance counselor whose dry humor keeps the others rolling, four years of lobbying to get a Doris Kearns Goodwin biography of Lyndon B. Johnson on the list.

At Wintergreen this month, they decided next year's list will include Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent," Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and short stories by Flannery O'Connor, including her famed "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." ("But now, Virginia has found its good man!" said Nicholas to groans from the group, whose members shared the political sentiment but found it a bit much.)

To celebrate their 10th anniversary in 2003, the women drove to New York City, where they visited museums, took long walks in Central Park and chose books for the following year in the van on the way home. For their 20th anniversary, they've settled on Paris.