We had our first mother-daughter book club a week or so ago. Four mothers and six daughters sat on the floor and the comfy chairs around a coffee table that held wine glasses, juice boxes, and snacks on paper plates.

I love talking about what I’m reading. I love “comparing and contrasting,” a favorite assignment from my middle school English teachers. I love reading and discussing books so much that I even got my Master’s in literature. I missed it.

When my girls were toddlers, I jumped at the chance to start a book club with fellow mothers of preschoolers. Now our kids are middle schoolers. We’ve been meeting monthly for about eight years. We go on a long weekends together once a year. (Last year we went to Napa Valley and the year before to South Beach. For the trip we read a book set in or about that place.)

For our first mother-daughter book club meeting in March we all read Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. For our next book we were choosing among these books:

Deenie by Judie Blume

The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Secret Order of the Gumm Street Girls by Elise Primavera

Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

And the last book won! I can’t wait to read it and discuss it. I can’t wait to be a mother who talks to her kids about important things, like literature.