It’s been two weeks since we hosted our first book club meeting here at WAMU. And we had the best time!

About 35 listeners came out to talk about Lauren Groff’s ‘Fates and Furies’ with myself, Chris Chester, Jonathan Wilson and Matt McCleskey. Unsurprisingly, they were thoughtful, curious and open to new ideas. Some hopped in to contribute repeatedly, others were content to sit back and listen. And many said that they were going to go back and re-read the novel after hearing other’s insights.

We also cracked open the question that Lauren Groff left for us when she came by to talk with Kojo earlier this year. It was:

In Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” there’s a play-within-a-play about Pyramus and Thisbe. Did anyone catch the reference? Is it too pretentious? (Can things done for a writer’s own joy be pretentious?)

One eagle-eyed reader DID catch the reference, but we generally decided that it wasn’t at all pretentious even so. The great thing about the way Groff refers to other works to her novel is that if you don’t get it, you’re not lost. She’s leaving an Easter egg that will delight whoever finds it, but if you don’t know you’re missing something you’ll still be happy.

Thanks again to everyone who joined us. And we’re talking now about the next steps for our book club, so if you didn’t make it out – stay tuned. We’ll hope to have another event lined up soon.

Meanwhile, last night Lauren Groff’s novel was one of five that made it onto the short list for the National Book Award’s fiction winner of the year.

Groff didn’t take the award home, but another recent Kojo Show guest did – Adam Johnson for his story collection “Fortune Smiles.” Some in the literary world were surprised by the choice – Johnson’s earlier novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son” earned him a Pulitzer and he faced tough competition from highly-acclaimed novels and another short story collection – but the award is well-earned. Some of the stories in the collection are incredibly haunting and powerful enough to have influenced my thinking still, since reading them.

And the non-fiction award went to another recent guest, Ta-Nehisi Coates for “Between the World and Me.” THIS selection surprised no one. Coates has recently been named a 2015 MacArthur fellow, won the Kirkus Prize and many other accolades. He’s also one of the rare authors to appear both with Kojo and Diane Rehm in a short span of time. Coates’ work is just that amazing. And we can’t wait to see what he, Groff, Johnson and all the other nominees do next.

We’re not quite ready to say there’s a “Kojo Effect” taking hold in the literary awards world. But a few days after appearing on the show Marlon James was awarded the Man Booker Prize for a “Brief History of Seven Killings” and now this? One more and we’ve got ourselves a trend….