Book Club
My mom is in a book club. I realize that this is true for many people's moms, at least for many people I have known over the years. And not just for moms. Apparently 5-7% of adults are active members of a book club at any given moment; 15-20% of adults have been in a book club at some point in their lives, and as many as 33% of active readers are in book clubs. But yeah, women are vastly more likely to be in book clubs (roughly 10% are currently in one).
I don't get book clubs. Why would you take a perfectly enjoyable, relaxing, self-paced, almost free, wholesome, and private activity like reading, something that is so much fun that it is my preferred way to spend my vacations, no matter the exotic location, company, or availability of pools, beaches, and drinks with little umbrellas, and turn it into a resented, competitive obligation?
There are lots of clichés about why book clubs are popular. Top of these is wine, snacks, and gossip, for which book clubs provide a great excuse, especially given that figure skating is only on TV every four years, not everyone likes football, hosting dinner parties is a pain, and weddings are kind of expensive. There is also that large gap in years between the last wedding and when you start to play bridge or mahjong. Although mahjong is experiencing a massive modern resurgence among Millennial and Gen Z people, which does not bode well for the future of book clubs.
Writing a post to shit all over book clubs is actually very easy, as they kind of have a bad rap, beyond the required reading / peer pressure vibe. Apparently authors and serious critics dread the phrase "book-club book," although they probably don't mind the sales figures that come with being selected by Oprah. I guess book-club books fall right in that overhyped middlebrow valley between inaccessible / experimental / difficult / artistic / innovative / reputable art, and the short sentences of James Patterson and Danielle Steel. They lack the honest thrill, pleasure, and page-turning appeal of John Grisham, Stephen King, Rachel Reid, Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J. Maas (yeah, romantasy is bigger than book clubs, btw); instead book-club books try to look smart and literary but are actually easy to digest and come with a list of questions for discussion at the end.
My mom largely agrees with me. She resents the shit out of pretty much every aspect of her book club. The only thing she hates more than having to read the books the others pick is having to pick one and present it herself. It's a serious source of stress and resentment.
Her book club is not about the cliché opportunity for wine and gossip; my mom hardly drinks, and she and her book-club friends see one another all the time outside of their various clubby gatherings. But she loves to read, although she rarely has time for it (her social calendar is insane). So the book club sounded like a good idea, as sort of a forcing function. But the unintended consequence was that it turned reading from a fun voluntary leisure activity into a "should" like dieting or "I should be getting more exercise."
I have of course offered several perfectly logical solutions.
- Leave the book club: This usually works for diets and exercise programs. But apparently not an option. She remains in her book club primarily because the membership has dwindled enough that her leaving might jeopardize its continuing existence. She loves her friends in her book club, and they claim to like the book club, so she sticks with it out of loyalty, one of her particular strong suits. Apparently you are only allowed to leave the book club feet first (either in a box or if you need to be in a memory-care unit).
- Pick books everyone actually likes: This seems obvious. You know, page turners; the sort of stuff you would read if you didn't have to. Kristin Hannah is sufficiently prolific that she can feed the book club for the rest of their lives. But no, it inevitably turns into a competitive Recent Discoveries exercise ("Oh, this author just won the Italian equivalent of the Booker Prize, and it's a very good translation. It's only 650 pages."). It has to be a book-club book, a recent overhyped bestseller of sufficient caliber destined for the friends-of-the-library sale table.
- Pick short classics: We all have a long list of minimal-length books from back in the day when we had to read a certain number of books for English class: Golding's Lord of the Flies. Orwell's Animal Farm. Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Steinbeck's The Pearl or Of Mice and Men. The confusing, depressing, but blessedly short Heart of Darkness by Conrad (and you get to recommend watching Apocalypse Now). Brave New World by Huxley. The Giver by Lois Lowry. Or short foreign classics, like The Stranger by Camus (L'Étranger) or The Metamorphosis by Kafka (Die Verwandlung). But I suppose they all read all of those in high school because gaming the system was still allowed, and besides, these are not new. Apparently there is an originality/discovery requirement.
- Don't read, just use ChatGPT: We tried this. She got busted right away. Too many m-dashes in her review, and the summaries and questions were just too good. Her friends are not stupid.
A book is a commitment, as we tend to finish what we start except in rare cases, not like a Netflix movie you can turn off after 10 minutes when you decide "Nah, I'm not in the mood for the world being destroyed by a comet tonight." This is exacerbated by having given up control over the choice of book and the timeline imposed by a book club, which make it easy to resent the book. My normal book choices are deeply impulsive, contextual and personal, that moment of freedom after finishing my last, when I decide which book will be my companion for the next considerable amount of time, without any constraint on how long that will be. The flip side of that is that giving or even recommending a book feels like a sort of imposition or presumption. I once made the ungrateful remark that I did not like well-intentioned people making me borrow books they loved, followed by aggressive follow-up ("What did you think?" or even "Have you read it yet?"). And yet I have done so myself, only to be slightly hurt when they never read it or did not love it like I did.
During a period of time in my life when people generously showed their empathy and love by sending me books, I discovered some of the greatest books I have ever read. I got loads of them — things they loved, things they thought I would love, things to pass the time and escape into another world, things that would help me understand or contemplate or deal, follow-ups to something we talked about, and so on. It was deeply touching and enriching. I read voraciously, gratefully, and I read a much wider range than I (or the Amazon algorithm or bestseller table) would have picked. So yeah, book choices, recommendations, and gifts by friends can be wonderful. I guess it's complicated.
And maybe that's the more generous way to view a book club — rather than an obligatory pass through the recent hits table, a thoughtful way to share a gift with a group of friends, with the opportunity to share why you picked it, given and received and appreciated as such.