The Book Club Crisis
How to dampen a passion
It happens every time. The ice cream truck resumes its creepy tinkle, and somebody in the group realizes that we have managed to go yet another entire winter without convening. An e-mail goes around about a resurrection. Are we up for it? One by one, the answers dart in. Sounds good. Yes! Double yes!! Book club shall not die.
Then the call for titles, which opens up all the questions that have been plaguing our book club ever since its inception nearly a decade ago. What kind of books do we want to read? And, while we’re thinking big, just who are we? We need to get some rules in place. Maybe that’s why we tend to fall apart; we lack purpose! We could be the book club that focuses on nineteenth-century morality tales. The one that requires a story not be set in America. Or what about if we stuck to developing countries? Somebody more practical-minded suggests we focus on books that are short, at least while we get our bearings. Short wins.
The nominees are submitted, the list circulated. I don’t see any titles that I recognize. I remain silent, like the restaurant diner who shifts in her seat while somebody else samples the newly opened bottle of wine and gives the waiter the verdict. But everybody in the e-mail chain wants to sit back and wait for further direction. We lapse into silence.
Here we go again, flakily sliding into delinquency. To look at our group, you would have little reason to suspect we’re anything but a diligent pack. It’s a fellowship meant to launch a thousand girl crushes—a crew of I-don’t-know-how-she-does-it women who run companies and collectively see every play, film and Little League game in the greater metropolitan area. (Until fairly recently, when I became a mother and stopped hosting book club at my parents’ apartment, I was the honorary kid.)
While I’m waiting to hear what we’ll be reading next, I send a note to the group saying that I’m going to write my next column about book clubs. I fantasize about a piece in which I share the ultimate dos and don’ts. Are there types of books that lend themselves to good discussion? Is it okay to show up if you haven’t read the book? Is there an ideal food to serve? Could everyone please send me their ideas? More silence.
I resort to Facebook, where I pose my question to my 687 friends, almost all of them book obsessed: “I’m writing my next column. What do you guys love and hate about your book club?” Nothing.
Horrified, I beg a few überbookish friends to post a comment and get the conversation started. One of them writes something very funny on my wall, only to e-mail me and admit she’s actually never belonged to a book club. “I think truly I’ve resisted b/c I don’t want to read what others tell me to read, but what I want to read,” she said. Another put it this way in her response: “I’m never part of one! That’s the worst thing I do. I am ONLY interested in my opinion and have accepted this about myself.”
It’s time I do the same. Here goes: I am not a book club person.
I love the people in my book club. But I’m not that interested in discussing books I don’t click with. And I find it disheartening to talk about books I love with people who don’t also happen to love them. I am content to talk about all of these things with the one person who sees all my points: myself.
Reading, for me, is an activity that is both solitary and deeply energizing. It keeps me going. I don’t need to belong to a club in order to ensure that I remain a devotee of the written word. No postmortem conversation is ever as enthralling as the firsthand experience of getting swept away by a story. The only kind of book clubs that make sense to me would be the cookbook clubs that are gaining ground; and even then, I’d rather just show up and have dinner with a lively group of people than be expected to compare notes on an author’s understanding of the vagaries of oven performance.
That said, I have no intention of quitting book club. I’ll take any excuse to see the people in my group — even if it’s to discuss a novel that only three out of ten of us had voted for, and that I had lost sleep to in order to finish in time. I come for the chatter and catching up that follows the book-deliberation portion. (The cheese is nice too.)
What I’m not crazy about is turning reading into a requirement-cum-parlor game. Any living-room discussion about a book, no matter how intelligent the discourse is, can strain under the weight of diligence and rigidity.
Book clubs, at least the ones where you’re supposed to go around the room, each person in turn saying whether he thought Uncle Ted was a charming character, or if she had seen that double murder coming from page fifty-two, might not be my bag. Which is weird. I don’t just love reading; I love googling an author or book I’m newly obsessed with and learning everything I can about a story’s history. And Lord knows I have nothing against screw-top wine.
If we can all agree that book club is a ruse for ten women who already read plenty of unassigned material to have an excuse to see one another en masse, couldn’t I convince my group to set up the necessary babysitters and come over for a dinner where nobody will put anyone on the spot about Eudora Welty’s treatment of time? Why not skip the homework, keep the camaraderie?
The other night I ran into the friend who wrote that pity post on my Facebook page. She reads more than pretty much anybody I know, and she told me she’s been reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — a book that’s at the top of my list. “You didn’t know? I’ve been tweeting about it nonstop,” she said.
“I guess I wasn’t paying attention,” I told her. “I’ve been busy tweeting about reading Elena Ferrante. She’s out of this world.”
She nodded, bit her cocktail straw. It was a sad little moment. Until an idea struck.
“Hey,” I said. “Would you consider starting a book club with me?”
“But we hate book clubs.”
“It will be different,” I said. “We don’t have to read anything in advance. No forced discussion of any kind. We can just show up and open a bottle of wine and tell each other about whatever we’re reading and what we’re excited to read next. And then we can gossip our heads off. It will be the bookish person’s unbookish book club.”
“I could get into that,” she said.
My original book club is working on sorting out a plan.
I’ll let you know which of the two meets next.
