In Rhode Island: Book Talk Among Friends

A few minutes late on a Thursday evening, Hope La Salle bundles herself up the stairs to the second floor of the Warwick (R.I.) Public Library. Palpitations of the heart. She breaks out a prescription bottle. "We may be dying in bed, but we'll get up and drag ourselves here," she gasps, before choking down a pill. "I'll pop my nitroglycerine."

"I'll use my asthma medicine," says Daphne Shein, also late, pulling her face away from the plastic mouthpiece on an aerosol inhaler.

"We don't miss Great Books," they agree.

They settle down at the conference table with their colleagues and address , their shared addiction. Time for another fix of . . . literary talk. What we have here is a Great Books discussion group, and the pure love of words has been bringing these good people together twice a month for 22 years now. The membership has changed some, but altogether, the group has logged almost 400 two-hour sessions without a single college credit being offered. Back when she started, says Shein, the books were still written on papyrus.

They have worked and reworked the familiar ground of Shakespeare and Vergil and have taken the measure of lesser Greats like Galen's On the Natural Faculties and Fichte's The Vocation of Man. The Great Books Foundation, which sponsors 2,500 such groups around the country, once actually ran out of reading material to suggest. For a few years, these stalwarts of Warwick had to scrape by on books that were merely "pretty good." Middleweights like Hemingway. Now they can handle anything literature can dish out.

It is perhaps a little easier than it sounds, La Salle interjects. Great Books, which is based in Chicago, leans heavily on excerpts, and in a year a group can polish off 15 masterpieces condensed in three slim paperbacks. La Salle, a droll gargoyle, founded the Warwick chapter and considers herself its elder stateswoman. She recalls that the readings were weightier back in her day. When The Iliad came around again on the reading list not long ago, she disdained the 144-page abridgment and brought in her own complete edition. Unhappily for the cause of purism, she confessed that age and rank having their privileges, what she'd really read that week was a murder mystery, Presumed Innocent. This is why the others, who are more dutiful, like the excerpts: "The goal," one of them says, "is to read the damned thing before it's time to discuss it."

The 15 or so regulars are mostly over 50. They are a nice mix of personalities: Shein, who prints slogans on T shirts by day (IT'S BETTER IN A SKIFF), is the wit, casting mordant glances over the rims of her reading glasses. Ray Finelli, an adman, is the old philosopher, with his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his vest. Marguerite Allen, a retired nurse, is a bulwark of feminism and familial love. Her patience is frequently tested by a newcomer who tends to blurt out opinions. On Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale, for instance, the Blurter remarks, "Talk about whoredom!" Allen's chin comes up and the corners of her mouth pull down, but she remains polite. They are a civilized group.