Why you should go to book club

I used to think that book clubs were the worst kind of clichéd hipster hobby.

But I have recently become a book club convert. A zealous convert in fact, as converts mostly are.

Morrissey went on record (literally) about the benefits of reading widely and well.

And indeed, I have discovered three ways that book clubs can make your life better. Not to mention that book clubs are providing this magic for free, usually.

1/ Novels are flight simulators for life

However weird, dark or seemingly alient to your own experience — from Hunter S Thompson to Evie Wyld — novels rehearse us for life. They help us experience situations and emotions from the safety of our own bed.

By reading more widely, you’ll understand yourself and others better.

As added incentive, you’ll be able to spot when someone is plagiarising something in an attempt to sound lofty. Hear someone passing off a sentence by Thomas Mann as their own thought? Smite them! I read Death in Venice at Book Club last month, so take that!

2/ Your co-clubbers are a petri-dish of humanity

The book club I attend is a wonderful rag-tag bunch of bookworms, quaffing a range of beverages they brought with them, and pontificating in a quiet room on a weekday evening.

When not considering the themes in the book, I’m considering things like:

Whose sleeping with who?

What do you think that person does for a living?

Does she always wear that beanie hat?

Is that drunkard roaring outside the bookshop going to come in and join us?

In my book club we have:

• A middle-aged man of indeterminate Antipodean accent, who drinks slyly from a super-strength can of lager that sits in his pocket. This person never fails to point out the sexual subtext of every book we read. Even when there isn’t one.
• A pair of star-crossed lovers. This man and woman are made for each other. But only I know it. I’m toying with how many book clubs I have to attend before I feel I know them well enough to tell them.
• The school swot who delivers her views with supreme confidence, and thumbs frantically through her copy of the book if someone raises a point she has missed.
• A professional knitter. Her opinions on books are pretty unremarkable but she’s a professional knitter. How cool is that? I haven’t seen her knit as we book-club. Yet.
• The bespectacled introvert, who rarely says anything at all about the books we read, but who comes to the club for a monthly dose of colour. I feel certain he is a tax inspector in his day job.

It’s like therapy, but more carefree.

Hearing interpretations of the same pages that differ wildly from your own reading is at first discombobulating, sometimes frustrating and ultimately liberating.

Allowing you to…

3/ Speak your mind

My book club has one rule. There is no leader.

This means, anyone can venture an opinion and nobody sitting in that circle is vested with the power to declare it right or wrong.

When you state your opinion at book club, it is like drawing your hand through a warm bath of encouragement. There are nods and murmurs of interest.

And even if someone violently opposes your interpretation of the book, we don’t override each other. We simply offer an alternative opinion with no reference to the previous opinion that we internally scoffed at. ‘Internally’ is the important word there.

It reminds me of the way they used to dance at Regency balls in Jane Austen novels — carefully stepping around each other at a respectful distance but internally burning with thrilling ideas.

I suspect this is the exact opposite of how most people encounter public speaking in their jobs. At work when you speak up, you’re more likely to be met with disinterest, open challenge or point scoring. And the worst etiquette of all, hearing your point made by someone else in the meeting moments later, under the plagiaristic pretence of ‘recapping’.

Not so in Book Club.

Book club as antidote to modern life

In our accelerated lives, how often do you hear people bemoaning their non-existent attention span? Their tendency to be distracted by the most trivial of things?

Collectively, we seem to be losing the attention span to read whole books. We squander our commutes flicking through freesheets we’re handed, glancing at Flipboard on our phones or scanning the synopses on Blinkist.

The discipline of being set homework — you must read this book, by this date, and come ready to talk about it — is immensely conducive to concentration and focus.

Book club. Find one. Read the book. Go.