my problem with book club

You know how sometimes it takes you a really long time to figure something out, how suddenly the answer just pops into your head, and you're all, like, Oooooooooh.

That was me an hour ago, when I realized that my problem with book club is that it's a club.

I need something serious, more serious than club.

I need a hard-ass book gang. 

For years, I've had this on-off love-not thing about book clubs, like I'm not in one but I feel like I should be, but then again not. I'm not counting the virtual bloggers' book club that I'm in, since it doesn't have the features I generally associate with a book club: getting together at someone's house with food and drink to talk about a book.

You'd think I'd be all about that, right? 

After all, I'm such a reading enthusiast, love books, love to talk about books, love people who love books. Surely I of all people would be all about this kind of gathering, right?

Wrong.

I was briefly in a book club years ago, with some gals from work. We'd get together once a month at someone's house, presumably to discuss the book we'd all agreed to read. Problem was not everyone would read it (ugh, slackers!), and the conversation generally devolved into gossip or work-talk, with too little, for my taste, attention to the work at hand. I'd generally feel annoyed by the end of the evening, duped into socializing when what I really wanted was book-talk.

My problem with book club: what I want is a graduate seminar.

It's possible that my academic training has spoiled me for the casual discussion of a novel over a glass of wine. While I assuredly CAN do that, I am infinitely happier if ALSO someone (possibly me) reads the secondary sources and delivers a mini-lecture to which everyone listens intently and then we discuss something meaty about the book. Or if someone has taken on reading a novel or two that influenced the writer in some way, and is prepared to share that with the group. This requires a kind of focused scholarly reading that I adore.

If there are index cards involved, then so much the better.

Which is not, I acknowledge, what most other people want to do for fun on a school-night.

So rather than bring my unrealistic expectations to a book club, I have this kind of fun on my own, in various spots around my house, with a book and a pencil and some index cards, taking notes and plotting out papers comparing this and that, expounding on this theme or that character.

I am forever writing essays.

Dude, I even do this with good television. I’ve got an essay brewing about an episode in the 5^th season of Friday Night Lights, about two parallel father-son story lines that really struck me, and all that they communicate about manhood in America, through the lens of that show. I can't help it.

This is how I like to read and think and watch and write, putting ideas together, not just consuming what's contained in the story, but also considering, thinking, reflecting in writing, continuing the conversation that a great book begins.

Even if I'm just talking to myself. Which is why I'm currently re-reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot, taking notes, and thinking about the novel from the point of view of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, which references it repeatedly.

This loop -- how one writer influences another, how stories interlock across great expanses of time and place -- that interests me so deeply, stokes my hungry Essay Furnace like nothing else.

All of which is not suitable for club really, or at least any book club I've ever heard of. Which makes me, as ever, a hard-ass book gang of one, armed with a pencil, look out.

;>

xx

Comments

[Yoshe]

Thanks for sharing, you fierce lady writer. Keep at it!!!

[Thien-Kim]

I've only been to a couple of book club meetings as a guest and they all seem to go like that. I wouldn't mind one where we really dived into the book for 30 minutes or so before we jump into the gossip portion.

[Janaki Kuruppu]

I was jealous of my sister, who was in a book club, and I could never find the time to join one. There is one that I could be part of - it's part of my synagogue's sisterhood activity agenda - but that carries with it the baggage of always being a book focused on Jewishness, or the Holocaust, and I want more than that limited sphere. I'm with you - I want a seminar class on books for working adults!

[Casey @ Salted Paltes]

You would love the meetup book club I am in, as it is run by someone who lead a lot of graduate seminars which we were just joking about last week. She does some outside research on the author or novel before the meeting and usually a few others do as well. I love it since it's at a bar so there is still wine/beer but you aren't relaxed like at someones house and we sit at a long table and go around. Occasionally people even raise hands.