Last Saturday (June 14) was officially the 300th meeting of the Austin Athenaeum. Counting by years, the 25th anniversary meeting was held in February of 2025.

What an amazing and rare thing for a book club.

We have only missed a few monthly meetings. Three times our meeting did not take place in the first year when the group was still getting organized. Twice we did not meet during the infamous lockdown of COVID-19. Otherwise, this group has met rain or shine, hot or cold, for richer or poorer.

The founding members (John, Bob, Dave and Peter) first met in February of 2000 on Dave’s back porch, just a month short of starting with the new millennium. (Your narrator was not yet in Austin; I say “we” in the editorial sense. But I knew about the establishment of the group, and I read the books in absentia.) When we had our first meeting:

• the World Wide Web, also known then as the “information superhighway” was only just being harnessed as a possible business application
• mobile phones did only one thing—make voice calls. And mobile phones were generally despised as the accoutrements of pretentious, rich, Wall Street types who felt they were simply too important not to be reachable at all times
• no children, teens, or college students had cell phones
• there was no such thing as “social media”
• ChatGPT was just a twinkle in Ray Kurtzweil’s eye
• the Twin Towers were still standing in Manhattan

The first few books we selected were

Ideas Have Consequences

Homer’s Odyssey,

and King Solomon’s Mines

The entire record of Athenaeum book selections is available for your perusal via a link in the left sidebar under “Reading Record” (on cell phone, scroll all the way to the bottom.) Or else click here.

The Austin Athenaeum is quite something, and we all recognize it and toast it regularly.