When Pat Squire retired from teaching third grade in suburban Philadelphia, the energetic “60- something” signed up for water aerobics, joined a chorus, took a class in bird watching, volunteered as an after-school tutor, taught a Bible class, visited museums, spent time on long walks and short trips. She also developed a second career as a public speaker specializing in two-minute book reviews.
Pat Squire reviews as many as two dozen books during most recent presentation at the Middletown Library. You don’t have to be a book lover to enjoy one of Pat Squire’s “Books for Groups” talks, which are so entertaining even people who never read tell her they always attend her programs.
Squire’s 60-minute presentations blend personal observations and a few jokes with succinct summaries of 24 current books on a variety of topics chosen specifically for the group. Genres include fiction, biography, memoirs, cookbooks, poetry, philosophy and history, with an occasional children’s book thrown in if it is also likely to appeal to adults.
Squire tries to find books she doesn’t think her audience will know; although she has seen some selections show up on the front page of The New York Times Book Review the following week.
“When I’m planning my talk, I want to segue from one book to the next,” she said.
In her recent presentation at the Middletown Public Library, Squire used a description of the hierarchy of librarians, (corporate or big public libraries at the top, bookmobiles at the bottom) to introduce a novel in which the queen of England becomes an avid reader after chasing her corgis into a bookmobile.
Squire explained that the queen uses her pocketbook to signal her staff by moving it to prearranged positions on her arm or holding it in a particular way. This lead to the next book, a nonfiction tome on body language.
“I give a very fast look at all these books with the goal that by the finish you will find something you want to read,” she said.
Some audience members want to read all of them.
The primary audiences for Squire’s program are women’s book groups, women’s church groups and retirement homes. Her busiest season is October and November, although March and April are also popular.
“Lots of the groups are senior groups and they don’t want to worry about the weather in the winter” she explained.
No matter what the group, Squire prides herself on matching her selections to her audience, including adding some books on tape if some audience members are blind or visually impaired.
She prepares her selections by browsing her shelves of current books and thinking about topics that will interest her audience. Depending on the demographics, she may include books on spirituality, cooking, travel or poetry along with memoirs or novels featuring characters that resemble or may interest her audience.
The books are carried to the presentation in two big green plastic boxes. Every audience member is provided with a book list and a pen to take notes.
After discussing the first book, she slides it down the table, like an experienced bartender. By the end of the presentation, the table is covered and the audience is invited to browse through the now somewhat familiar volumes.
Squire reads an average of two books a week and always has between 75 to 100 current books categorized and ready to include in a program. She schedules an hour of reading every day all year round but she may read longer if she gets interested.
“I have two or three books going at the same time – poetry, some essays, maybe a novel or a memoir,” she said. “I read because I love to read. Some things I read I’m never going to use like cozy English mysteries. I also read a lot of children’s books … I don’t like violence, pulp stuff, that’s trash.”
“I care about the sentence structure and language,” she added.
Most of Squire’s selections are short.
“I like to stay around 200 pages,” she said, “If it’s longer, I want to read something that I would use a lot …While I’m reading, if there is a turn of phrase, I underline in pencil and put little Post-Its in. After I finish, I write it up.”
Each of her write-ups includes a very short synopsis of the story and lasts about two minutes.
In her Philadelphia home, Squire has a book room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases where books are stored by category. She marks each volume so she knows how many times and for whom she has used it. When they are no longer current, she removes them.
The four-page book list she distributes not only serves as a place for her audience to take notes but also helps keep her on time.
“I know it will take a half-hour to do the first two pages [and finish the first box of books]. That keeps me on track,” she said.
Squire, who has a summerhouse in Little Silver, grew up in Red Bank where her father was the minister at the Methodist church on Broad Street. Both her parents were great readers and gave books as birthday and Christmas presents. She and her sister often took a shopping cart to the Red Bank Public Library in order to carry the 12 books apiece they were allowed to borrow.
While attending Arcadia University in suburban Philadelphia, the book lover had a summer job at the Red Bank library.
“I ran the children’s summer reading program, did story hour and learned how to do everything else in that library from shelf reading, to checkout and [check] in, processing new books and typing catalog cards,” she wrote in a e-mailed biography.
Squire credits two different experiences as inspirations for her program.
“As a child [and to this day] my family vacationed at Silver Bay YMCA of the Adirondacks. They had a woman who gave informal ‘book talks.’ Mostly she told stories and jokes and mentioned a few books. My mother and aunt thought it was frivolous but I sat in the back and thought I could do that.”
Squire drew on that early belief when she began teaching in a school with a Silent Sustained Reading Program that required all students to read silently for a specified period every day.
“I always made friends with the librarian at the school. We had a deal that she would call as soon as new books were in,” she explained. “I would dash down with shopping bags and skim them over the weekend. Once a month I would give a book talk about all these new books so no one could ever say ‘I have nothing to read.’ ”
Squire retired in 1995. “That summer I was at loose ends,” she said.
So she asked the Silver Bay YMCA program chair if she could resurrect the book talks.
“I told him I could get an audience since my extended family and friends were all there,” she recalled. The built-in audience grew and Squire continues to give two weekly talks at the camp every year in addition to about 15 other presentations mostly in New Jersey and Philadelphia.
Squire buys all her books, and although the confirmed bibliophile admits to keeping some of them, she has several outlets for the ones she rotates off her shelves. She set up a library in her church fellowship hall for the religious and spiritual books she uses for church and synagogue presentations. Children’s books are donated to school libraries and other books are taken to the YMCA in the Adirondacks to be sold as a camp fundraiser.
Pat Squire returns to Red Bank in June to present “Books for Groups” to the Red Bank United Methodist Women.