I joined a book club. Okay, that’s not all. I joined not one but three book clubs—and left each as quickly as the last. I am a twenty-something female, and I love literature, I really do. It’s just that book clubs… I can’t make them work.
My first was a summer fling, hosted by my neighborhood public library. I thought it would, you know, give me some stability, maybe ground me in the community. I ran away from that and quickly got involved in something that seemed better, a club organized through a local bookstore. That one got me through the harsh snows of my first Minnesota winter, but by spring I was ready for something new. I hooked up with some friends for a third. They say never to do that, and they are right. It lasted just a few fleeting months.
Three book clubs in less than a year. Aren’t they supposed to be fun? Why can’t I stick with something so seemingly easy and informal? Book clubs have become the modern person’s coffeehouse or salon—and also a form of continuing education for new graduates and a ratings gimmick for morning news shows, afternoon talk shows, art museums, and public radio programs. [Even this magazine sponsors a book club—but it’s a good one, honest!—Eds.] Maybe that’s part of the problem. Whereas only the most voracious young readers once sought out book clubs, now book-clubbing is so commonplace that we take it for granted. We forget that each club, and each reader, is unique.
I couldn’t stick with any one club because my stated expectations were masking unspoken needs. When I joined each club, I thought I had only the best, most literal intentions: I simply wanted to read and discuss books. In truth, what I yearned for was much bigger than that. I joined the library’s club to meet new people, the bookstore’s to learn more about regional issues. With my friends, I hoped to catch up on their lives. This discord stirred up an illogical but very real guilt problem. But after talking with fellow book-club dropouts—all female, city-dwelling professionals in their mid-twenties to early thirties—I realized I am not alone.
“I blame nobody but myself,” Elena told me when I broached the subject of her unsuccessful attempts at clubbing. She is a veteran of three clubs and one “book club idea,” a fantasy that remained out of reach.
Christy stuck it out in her book club for about eighteen months. She tried to leave after seven, but “they guilted me back in,” she told me in hindsight. Then she fell into a passive-aggressive behavior pattern. She stopped reading the books (“no one else was really reading them anyway”), she deliberately skipped meetings, but nothing worked. She finally had to issue a definitive
“I QUIT!” Her club still meets, and one member asked recently if they were ever going to get
her back. “The guilt… it continues to eat me,” Christy said.
Like me, Julie learned more about herself than she did about the characters in the books she read. “I finally realized that I don’t have the right kind of personality to be in a book club,” she said. Both Elena and Julie were looking for an intimacy that they found lacking in club discussions. “I was sometimes too shy to offer my thoughts,” said Elena, while Julie discovered that “when discussing ideas, I really do better in groups of two or three people.”
Among book-club dropouts there are those, of course, who were looking strictly for literary talk, nothing more. Michele is one of them, but she couldn’t find a straight-up discussion at any of the three clubs she belonged to over the years. Other things kept interfering with her desires.
“All of these women had an ‘egg dish’ to make,” she said. “I am not old enough to have my own egg-dish recipe. It is questionable whether I will ever have one. We’d meet and spend approximately fifteen minutes on the book.…The rest of the time it was all about people’s engagements and wedding plans, pregnancies, child care.” And their respective egg dishes.
Elena, too, truly enjoyed hard talk about narrative arc, characters as metaphors, and prose style. In fact, she wanted to go nuts with a sort of postmodern exegesis. “I love to gossip about characters in books,” she said. But she came to realize her motivation for clubbing had nothing to do with literature. “The real reason I joined a club… I wanted to keep in touch with friends. It was strange, really, because I would get frustrated if we didn’t talk about the books, even though that wasn’t my real motivation for joining.” The books were an excuse to talk to people. But since the groups are called book clubs and not people clubs, Elena felt a conflict over purpose.
What adds poignancy to Elena’s curious statement is the fact that she didn’t even like a lot of the books her clubs read. She coped by convincing herself not to read the book too far in advance of the meeting, because she would forget the plot; then, with the meeting looming, she would tell herself she couldn’t possibly finish the book in time. “I always made it so difficult for myself!” she said.
Julie and Christy found that there were moral and religious obstacles that prevented them from fully enjoying their clubs’ selections. Julie said that she’s “sensitive to ‘adult subject matter,’” and therefore unwilling to join a club unless she’s assured that her interests would match other members’. Christy did not want to discuss books centered on religion. When her club chose to read a book from the Left Behind series, which is rather zealously fundamentalist, she read it “out of sick curiosity.” When that choice was followed by a similar book, she decided it was time to bail.
I faced the opposite problem, and I learned that too much compatibility can lead to what amounts to literary indigestion. In my “friends” club, we chose books like children choose between Brussels sprouts and lima beans: We felt compelled to read this classic or that political tome, but we didn’t really want to. Book clubs attracted Michele because they “seemed like a great way to maintain an intellectual pursuit after college,” she said. But the one group she started ended after a single meeting because “we couldn’t make it through Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.”
Guilt. Frustration. Disorganization. Disagreements. This is the dysfunctional drama I, and others like me, have acted out over and over again in our attempts to find fulfillment in book clubs.
Elena claims that when she’s ready to limit herself strictly to book discussions, she would join a club again. But when she’s seeking friendship, she will meet for coffee. She’s learned the difference the hard way. Of course, there’s the ever-present possibility that she could join a club whose members have different priorities. In an attempt to avoid this, Michele formed a book club of her own, establishing a firm set of rules before the first meeting:
(1) Book discussion must last for at least forty-five minutes.
(2) Any discussion of marriage, babies, jobs, etc. must occur after the book discussion.
(3) Club meetings must occur at a public place (preferably a bar) within Minneapolis
city limits.
(4) Egg dishes are prohibited.
(5) If someone doesn’t like (1) through (4), she can start her own book club.
Christy’s solution is even simpler: “If you read a good book, loan it to a friend and hope that others will do the same for you.”
Kristin Thiel is a local writer.
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