Some Notes On My First Book Club
I’ve been an avid reader all my life, and I’ve always had opinions about books. But I’ve never been in a book club. Until this last year. I have a coworker whom I kind of inspired to read some horror fiction, and as she read more and more horror fiction she started meeting others who were similar to herself; people who weren’t necessarily avid horror readers per say, but people who definitely skewed “Creepy.” Thus was born the Creepy Girl Book Club.
Now the number one rule of creepy girl book club is not that you have to be a girl. It’s that you Don’t talk about Creepy Girl Book Club! This kind of started off as a joke, related to the fact that my coworker (I’ll call her Bunny from here on out.) wanted to make sure that the book club was a safe space for women to talk about books that featured wet squishy-bits of both the violent and sexy type. Bunny invited people to the club. Bunny chose who participated, with this goal in mind. Nobody else was allowed to invite people to the club.
There was a lot of enthusiasm early on, and Bunny very quickly decided that keeping the space open for everyone to talk, without interruption, was very important. People in the club were honestly enthusiastic about the books and the discussions about them. People eagerly wanted to follow up on a point made by someone else, and it was far too easy for some people to dominate the conversation. Bunny very quickly squashed the habit of talking over people, or interrupting people. The Creepy Girl Book Club became a benevolent dictatorship, ruled over by Bunny. Straddling the line between rigid structure that stifled organic discussion, and anarchy where only the loudest voices were heard was not easy. But because of both the vision of Bunny, and the good will and diligent efforts from the members of the book club, this has been mostly achieved.
For my part, I was very aware from the beginning that I have a lot of opinions about books and I love the sound of my own voice. So I very much try to put on my active listening ears when at book club. Frankly, the best parts of book club for me are responding to other people’s insights and reactions, rather than sharing my own. For me, a person who has lived inside his own head with books for most of his life, it’s fascinating to see how other people react to the book, and why. I don’t need to rabidly spew my own views on the book in question in book club — that’s what the internet is for!
One thing that has proven to be reliable is that most of the books have proven to be divisive, to one degree or another. Not all the people like the same books all of the time. It is fascinating to see some people react strongly to a book, in ways I wouldn’t have expected. Early on, Bunny made sure it was clear that you were allowed to hate a book. To despise it. Or to love it, even if everyone else in the group felt differently. And because of my inborne imp-of-the-perverse (or the fact that I was an english major) I often found myself arguing in defense of an author’s work… “I don’t think you were the intended target audience for this book… they were trying to do a very specific thing, which I think they were very successful at. But if you haven’t read Gene Wolfe, I can see why you wouldn’t give a fuck” is certainly a legendary high-point for my contributions to the book club dialog.
Another thing that happened to me because of the Creepy Girl Book Club is that I went back and re-read some books I haven’t read for decades. I was very pleased that both my own reactions to a favorite book from 20 years ago were positive, and many of my creepy-peers also found the book to be engaging and enjoyable. I’m not going to lie, I mostly don’t trust twenty-something-year-old me’s judgements… aesthetic or otherwise. So it’s nice when my younger self occasionally turned out to have good taste.
There have been a number of different formats we have used to stimulate conversations about the book… some more formal than others. I particularly like the “put 20 study questions in a hat and everyone draws a question and answers it.” format. But that was mainly because I wrote the questions for that book. (“Who was your favorite character and why was it Randy” was another high point to my contributions to the Creepy conversation.) But as time has gone by, the club hasn’t needed formal structures like that to generate conversations and keep everyone involved.
The informal structures that have evolved and worked are:
- Bunny has the conch (Actually, it’s a plastic Halloween-decoration femur. But whatever.) She directs and selects who speaks next and who responds to who.
- People who want to respond can use 1 finger to indicate a small point or response to what someone said, or 2 fingers to indicate a major jumping off point or in depth observation.
This one finger/two finger system serves two purposes. It allows bunny to have a sense of how best to keep the conversation flowing in a compelling way…One should get to the small points and responses to what was just said, before going on to another topic.
The second purpose is it makes us conscious of what we are specifically supposed to be talking about… Am I responding specifically to that one point? Or am I launching the discussion on a whole new trajectory? I think this conscious signing of our intentions really helps the overall group dynamic. This structure also allows us to not go too far down nested rabbit holes, because bunny knows about that person in the corner who has patiently had two fingers up for several rounds of comments concerning one narrow facet of the book.
For me, another really nice part of the book club is the common talking points I have with a group of up to 10 other people. Very rarely do people get together to talk about a book and its even rarer that people have a shared reading history and a shared knowledge of other peoples responses to that shared reading history. Its ever rarer for for people out in the wild to be comfortable talking with each other about books like these!
The sense of community that has evolved with this book club has been amazing. People bring food and drinks. And I don’t just mean chips and soda. Wine bottles by the dozen have been consumed at this bok club, and at least one of our members has been regularly baking custom book-themed pastries or cookies of one sort or another, depending on the book.
I have forced myself to develop a taste for wine, so as to be a better creepy girl, and I’ve enjoyed the hard kombucha when it is brought to the meetings.
In addition to the food and general comradery there have been non-book club Creepy Girl events with as well. A trip to the local Haunted halloween theme park was a blast,
and the trip to the theater, opening week, to watch the movie version of the book we had just read the previous month was another high point.
As a reader and as a bookseller, I talk a lot about “the long conversation” in genres… where authors and readers from generation to generation have an overlapping pool of specific works that they have read… writers can refer to these works, and readers can recognize the references, and that shared experience allows for jargon and shorthand that not only creates efficiencies in story telling but also great a sense of shared in-group camaraderie… “we are all part of the [Insert genre here] tribe!”
That feeling is in part one of the special appeals of being a genre reader… recognizing elements of that long conversation in a text, and being a part of a community defined by that literature. For me, this carefully curated book club has been like a micro-genre experience. I’ve read several books I wouldn’t have otherwise read and I’ve gotten to revisit works from my past that I’ve loved, and I’ve been able to have in-depth conversations with the same group of 8–15 people over the course of the last year.
I know not everyone has had book club experiences like this. I’m pretty lucy to have Bunny preside over things and form and shape this community into something special. I think it’s really funny that one of the horror novels that Bunny and I both read, before the book club sprang into existence was The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. Thank you Bunny, for all your efforts. The Creepy Girl Book Club is definitely like the second club in that book, and not the first one. Hopefully we won’t have to slay any vampires this year!
