Book Club Spotlight: Red Hook Library

Off The Shelf highlights book discussion groups happening at our libraries across Brooklyn. All of our book discussion groups are free and everyone is welcome to participate. Red Hook Book Club partners with local business, Record Shop, to host meetings in their space. 

Picture a small-town record shop. Crates upon crates of vinyl, organized into categories like "Protest Music" and "High Rollers." There's a handmade sign, almost certainly drawn by one of the young kids who live in the nearby Red Hook East and West Houses--10, maybe 12 years old--who come to the record shop to work, but more often than not, to tinker, build, paint, hang out, borrow a basketball to play Knockout across the street. The sign, masking taped to the desk up front, greets you: "Welcome Humens." Another sign: "You could be Rod Stewart." Another: pale blue neon script that just says, "Music" in the window facing the street.  Another: "record shop ☮", on the door. Its name. Everything in the place is built or recycled, and in the back--through saloon style doors--someone else runs a business cutting hair. As small town as it feels, this shop is in Brooklyn—and once a month, is the home for Red Hook Library's book club.

Like many communities in Brooklyn, Red Hook is in flux and in the midst of rapid gentrification, which has resulted in a deeply divided community, at the geographic (and in some ways also the ideological) center of which sits the Red Hook Library. This is vividly borne out by the median household income of the neighborhood—from $14,000 all the way up to $123,000—the starkest low-to-high ratio in the borough. The Record Shop sits on Van Brunt St., somewhere in the middle of that range. The NYCHA houses, back toward Lorraine, are at the bottom.

Record Shop is a space that embodies the cognoscenti hip culture of a still "relatively undiscovered" neighborhood and is an environment that truly is for everyone—like the flocks of French tourists who cruise through on their matching orange bicycles each weekend, or the casual Pioneer Works show-goer, or the very tan, muscled Italian guy who said, Marone! when we shook hands, surprised by the firmness of my grip. At the center of this is Bene Coopersmith, Record Shop's owner. Referred to, only half-jokingly, as the "Mayor of Red Hook, " he is an active member of the community, in every sense of the phrase. He donates time (and records) to a good number of community events, and is always more than game to take on new experiments, like hosting a monthly book club there in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library.

Since I started the Red Hook Book Club in January 2018, attendance has held at an astonishing 12-14 people per meeting. I have an email list that has steadily grown to include 45 people and counting. The shop is normally closed on Mondays, but Bene makes a special exception for us. With a record playing in the background, we wheel the record crates out of the center of the shop, pull up the mismatched chairs and benches into a conversational circle, and dig in to our discussion. And our snacks. The book club is also BYOB--book, sure, but also wine, beer, tea, seltzer, mezcal. I'm sharing the details not to get into the weeds, but to conjure up a sense of how convivial and warm the atmosphere is. And yet we fight. Or at least disagree vigorously.

So far, the books we've read have been a bit of a grand tour of major social and political issues: Kindred by Octavia Butler for Black History Month (with some supplementary reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Were Eight Years in Power and Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land); I Must Be Living Twice by Eileen Myles during Pride; Hunger by Roxane Gay; If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin; The Sellout by Paul Beatty. But we've also read The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, and our inaugural book was The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. We read her aloud.

People come to this book club to have their preconceptions dismantled. To settle into a space in which they can think through their ideas around a topic in dialogue. For a high level of discourse, without being academic or inaccessible. We don't digress into personal anecdote often, but we do hold space for people's stories, pain, discomfort. More than once, I've been told by someone that they left feeling differently about the book than when they came in, and more than once I have done the same.

Of course it's not perfect. It's not nearly as diverse a group as anyone would like, and the divide between the two Red Hooks only blurs slightly, groaning as it strains ever wider. But I feel confident that programs and partnerships like this are moving the needle in the right direction, and that if there are any two things that are going to help shore up a sense of community even as a luxury esplanade threatens to flatten it, they'll be books and music. It may sound naive, but the kind of love they inspire might be the only thing left after the fall.

The Red Hook Book Club meets on the last Monday of every month from 6:30-8:00pm. The next meeting will be on Monday, January 28th @ The Record Shop.