The Booker Tea Reading Group began with a holiday reading list.
In late 1996, Tammi L. Coles was living in Washington, DC, and getting ready to visit a friend studying at the London School of Economics. She had spent years reading political nonfiction and wanted a change: fiction, and fiction with a British connection, for the trip. Looking for a place to start, she found the Booker Prize.
Three books came along on that holiday: Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient, Pat Barker’s novel The Ghost Road, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day. She loved all three, and she came home wanting to talk about them.
So she drew up a list of twelve prizewinning novels and invited friends to join her for tea on a Sunday afternoon to discuss them, one book a month. The first meeting took place in January 1997. The name came from her friend Vicki Linton, who joked that a Sunday tea built on the Booker Prize ought to be called the Booker Tea, a nod to Booker T. Washington, the African American educator and author. The pun stuck, and so did the idea behind it: books with real weight that help us understand the world we live in.
From a circle of friends to a citywide group
The first year was a hit. Friends brought friends, and the group opened to neighbors in Mount Pleasant. An ad in the Washington City Paper brought in more readers, and as the first online bulletin boards and neighborhood email lists appeared, the Booker Tea found its way onto those too. One of the earliest members, Kathy Sawyer, joined in 1997 and stayed for more than two decades.
Over the years the reading list grew beyond the Booker shortlist to literature from around the world, chosen by the members themselves. The tea, the Sundays, and the conversation stayed.
A second home in Berlin
In 2006, Tammi moved to Berlin. She did not plan to stay, and she missed her book group from the start. When Berlin became home, the Booker Tea came with her. Kathy took over the Washington chapter, and for a time the two cities even tried to read the same books, an ocean apart.
The Berlin group still meets on the third Sunday of every month, in members’ homes and sometimes on Zoom, with a potluck lunch on the table. In 2012, a German-language group joined it, bringing native speakers and learners together over German literature every second month.
Still turning pages
The Washington chapter closed in 2018, after Kathy moved away. (You can read more about it on the Washington, DC, chapter page.) In 2023, Tammi handed leadership of the English group to longtime member Jennifer Montgomery, reducing her role to web development and membership support.
Thirty years after that first list, the idea is the same: good books, good company, and a cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon. If that sounds like your kind of a good time, come and join us.
Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash.
