how i became a book club convert
Many friends, particularly older ones, have been in book clubs, some of them for 25 years or more. They are devoted to them. They are always looking forward to that once-a-month get-together.
I’d never been that interested.
Who would want to read, I had always thought, a book chosen by a group, a book choice decided upon by someone else, someone who might have different tastes and sensibilities?
When I want to choose a book, I want to look around the shelves in my house or the stalls at the library or the tables at my local bookstore. I want to pick up a new-looking title, riffle through the pages a bit, and come to the conclusion that yeah, this seems interesting — I think it’ll be my next book. The choice would be solely mine, based on my tastes, my sensibilities, my knowledge and my mood.
I also didn’t want to read according to a schedule — none of the I’ve got to finish this 400-page tome by the second Tuesday or third Friday of the month. Didn’t want to race through anything just so I could be ready to be a participant in a discussion.
I also didn’t want to always read the same kind of book, the style of book chosen by committee — all fantasy or noir thrillers or newly released fiction.
Most of all, I didn’t want to feel that reading a book was a responsibility, a chore, something else to add to the never-ending to-do list.
It turns out, I was really wrong.
About three years ago, a good friend suggested I join his long-standing book club. A member had dropped out and my friend thought I’d be a good replacement, that I’d fit in well. The guys—the club was all men—were all my age or older. Several of them quite a bit older.
I was reluctant at first, for all the reasons above, but then — mostly out of respect for my friend — I decided to give it a try.
And because of that, over the last few years I have gotten to read books I never would have read — would probably never even have come across — and am immensely grateful that I had. And I’ve gotten to understand the books I’ve read more deeply.
My book club only reads fiction, but that’s my preference as well. Since I’ve been in the book club, I’ve gotten to read, among many others, the uproarious “The Netanyahus,” by Joshua Cohen; I devoured Gabrielle Zevin’s fascinating book about video game designers, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.” My book club read the sweeping historical fantasy, “Victory City,” by Salman Rushdie and the emotionally resonant “A Horse Walks Into a Bar” by David Grossman.
My reading can be provincial, tending toward American and British writers, but the book club has opened me up. In the last few years, we’ve read the Indian Rushie, the Israeli Grossman, the Australian Eleanor Catton, the Austrian Joseph Roth, the exquisite “Small Things Like These” by the Irishwoman Claire Keegan, the fascinating “The Maniac,” by the Chilean Benjamin Labatut and the inventive “The Three-Body Problem” by the Chinese Cixin Liu.
And then there are the discussions. Reading, to me, had always been a private affair, my forming my own opinions about the book I had finished. But listening to others talking about what we all had read has given me a broader perspective.
Oh, so that’s what that means — I hadn’t really grasped that point. I didn’t know that. Did you really think it happened that way? And why didn’t you like that novel as much as I did? How come you didn’t see the holes in the plot? And I learned things, too, from the other members of the group (did you know that the character U-Haul in Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead” is modeled on Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep?).
The discussions are lively, smart, engaged. There is some socializing at the beginning — talk of politics and such — but we pretty quickly get down to what has brought us together: the book under discussion.
My next book club meet-up is in a month. It’s on my calendar and at a time when there’s little structure to my life gives me something to build around. It’s nice to already know that I have something set for the second Wednesday.
The good news is I am a fast reader, which means I can read our book club selection well before the second Wednesday but I can also still read another book during that period. That would be a book of my own choice. It’s the best of both worlds.