I joined a new book club. (If you’re just joining us, you may not know the backstory on this.) A few weeks ago, I was out walking with Minor one day and ran into a woman I sort of know just from seeing her at kid-friendly functions around town, and she and her friend invited me to their meeting that week. I went and enjoyed myself; it’s good to have people to talk books with.

With book clubs, selection is always problematic. We were tossing around a few ideas, and I mentioned that the New York Times Book Review had recently convened a panel of authors to select the best American novel of the past 25 years. (Beloved won.) I had been pleased and surprised to see one of my favorite books of all time, Norman Rush’s Mating, given honorable mention.

Upon hearing my assessment, the book club expressed an immediate desire to add Mating to their list, but I balked. What if they hated it? A strong recommendation can seem pushy, almost aggressive, and one that does not live up to its promise can only produce resentment. I wasn’t willing to take that risk with a bunch of people I barely knew, so in deference to my feelings they chose something else instead. (A few said they would check it out on their own, though.)

The quality of a reading experience is not dictated solely by the reading material. It’s influenced by who you are, where you’ve been, what you have in common with the text, the shape and feel of the book, who gave it to you, where you read it, and (of course) the cover illustration. (For example, I can’t enjoy a classic that has a movie still on its front cover, even if I loved the adaptation.) I read Mating when it first came out in paperback, in 1992, when I was in the Peace Corps. Book clubs were not yet in vogue, but the volunteer community was like the best book club ever: a few dozen people who loved to read, had lots of down time with little else to amuse them, and were forced to circulate a limited supply of books. The “book of the month” was whatever was in someone else’s backpack the next time you saw him.

I had one friend, a boy I dated occasionally, who berated me for picking up the occasional Patricia Cornwell or Jonathan Kellerman. (I always replied that when he got his master’s in English then he could criticize my reading choices; but, you know, in recent years I’ve come around to his way of thinking, and I almost never pick up junk anymore.) It was he who got me to look at Wuthering Heights in a new way by pointing out the humor and the cinematic quality of the narration. He tried, less successfully, to get me more interested in Vonnegut, Heinlein, and Marquez. Our tastes were obviously not completely similar, so I took his recommendation of Mating with a grain of salt, but I couldn’t resist it because it was a newly published book, a rarity in our reading universe. He had gotten it from his real (non-volunteer) girlfriend, an American who was now living in Paris, whom he had visited.

His girlfriend, knowing that he would read the book, had annotated it with little messages to him in French, which I spoke (poorly, but well enough so that my eyes popped a few times at her references) and he was learning. It was jarring and yet fitting to move from the romance between expats in Africa on the page to the romance in the notes, both of which inolved me, another expat in Africa, as voyeuse. But I just adored the book.

I had been surprised to see Mating given runner-up status by the New York Times along with the multiple DeLillos, Roths, and Updikes, because it seems so different in character. I found Mating completely delightful and entertaining, whereas Roth and Updike have struck me as good but depressing, and the few paragraphs of DeLillo I’ve read have just been exhausting. I also read a lot of Roth when I was in the Peace Corps, starting with Portnoy’s Complaint, but my relationship with Updike’s books goes back high school. Updike set his Rabbit series in the city where I was born, reimagined as “Brewer” in the novels. There weren’t too many literary efforts connected with this dying city, so I was practically obligated to read them. (Although Reading, PA can also boast Wallace Stevens.)

None of this really has anything to do with Mating, except that when we were talking about the New York Times list, one of my new book club compatriots said, “John Updike and I go to the same dentist.” It turns out that life has brought both of us from our beginnings in Reading to this same little corner of New England. This weekend’s NYT Book Review features an essay by Updike in which he mentions both the city in which I was born and the city where I currently live. Small world, eh? Call me, John! Maybe we can hang out at the gym, where our other famous local novelist and I both work out.

Updike also has a new book, Terrorist. I’m imagining Rabbit plotting to blow up the Pagoda.