After lockdown lifted, our writer spent three years in search of the perfect book club, only to find that no two readers are ever on the same page.
For the young of body and mind, literature is sustained by scenes, but as you grow older it is sustained by clubs – and, if you are lucky, sofas. Or so I thought when, after lockdown, I found myself in need of literature and fellowship. I wanted to read good books in the company of like-minded people in comfort, envious as I was of my mother’s longstanding group that meets over fizzy wine and snacks in comfy lounges, and from which I was by distance and, inclination of my parent, excluded.
Being male, there was no ready-made group to join locally. So, like many misguided men before me, I turned to the internet. First stop: the Rebel Book Club, whose site informed me they were reading The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Not some racy Dimes Square autofiction sadly but a manual on how to persuade yourself that you deserve to be rich, and a typical read for the Rebel Book Club, founded by Ben Keene. This book reading gang has been more successful than the one Keene gathered in the 2000s to build an ecotourist hub in Sierra Leone, a fraught process documented by the BBC’s Tribe: Wanted.
In the function room of a hotdesk tech hub near Old Street, clearly taking any offers since WFH kicked in, 60 paying rebels assembled for bite-sized talks hosted by a miked-up facilitator who was neither Keene nor the author. Interspersed were small group discussions that resembled corporate team-building exercises. When tasked with recalling our earliest money memories, others spoke of counting coins with parents. Mentally recoiling at the Effective Altruism of it all, I recalled stealing 50p from my father’s bedside table, marvelling at the coin’s heaviness in my hand. This was a case of Tribe: Unwanted for me.
The Silent Book Club appeared to offer the solution. At the Silent Book Club, you say hello at the beginning, then you read your own book for a while, and then talk about it. When I attended a British-based online session, I discovered that it’s a global phenomenon. A member of the Albuquerque chapter, who had dropped in on our UK call, explained that two women from San Francisco invented the format – although they hold no monopoly over it. Indeed when the founders endorsed Kamala Harris in last year’s election, a wave of Trump voters left in protest and presumably set up their own Silent Book Group network; less silent now about their silence, one imagines.
The group chat began with a wild list of works: Thomas Hardy, L’Attentat by Yasmina Khadra. Someone was reading not one but two Marilyn Manson biographies, although intriguingly they never returned to the Zoom after reading time. I am embarrassed to say I spent a good deal of the time dedicated to reading, thinking up clever things to say about what I was supposed to be reading. However, the secret rule of Silent Book Club appears to be that you don’t actually talk about the books you’ve silently read at Silent Book Club.
It was an unlucky coincidence that one particular member had been reading next to what was evidently a major fireworks display. It was, however, a revealing one. She was greeted with such overwhelming sympathy in the group that all literary conversation faded. Petitions for banning fireworks were shared in the group chat. If only firework people came to Silent Book Club instead, said one participant. Later I would discover that Silent Book Club’s tagline is ‘Happy Hour for Introverts!’ and this made a lot of sense. It felt less like a book club, and more like a get-together for people who thought lockdown was brilliant.
Two failed experiences in, I unwisely doubled down on my strategy. I read that in the 18th century, when novels and magazines emerged, men gathered in the inns of provincial towns to order pamphlets advertised in the back pages and read them together. Some historians say that this gave birth to the book club. I suspect that’s only half the story. The women, I imagine, were happy at home reading novels together, sharing waspish thoughts in the absence of their bloviating, Hogarthian husbands. Things had not changed apparently. I had to go out into the world to find what I was after.
The MeetUp app, a resolutely 21st century bit of software which does exactly what you expect it would, led me first to a group of earnest, young professionals who had independently moved to an orbital town not far from London. With them, I read a terrific Agatha Christie novel and a really poor fantasy novel. But after a while I noticed how I was conspicuously older and more attached to the books than the average members, who were clearly using genre fiction and overpriced gastropubs as social lubricants. I left the kids to their slate-mounted retro puddings and ploughed onwards.
I joined another group through MeetUp that met in a different provincial market town pub – then left immediately, after one elderly man opened conversation on Annie Ernaux’s The Years by saying it was so bad it gave him confidence he’d get his own book published. I mean, it is a bit listy, but he said it with such conviction that I drained my £7 pint of Guinness and then left at the next toilet break. It dawned on me that the very ease of online group-finding encouraged the opposite of commitment. You shouldn’t be able to rage-quit a book club.
I was developing an uneasy feeling in my stomach, very literally. Food should be involved in a book club but not too much. In one group, hosted again in a gastropub, I discussed Slaughterhouse-Five with someone working his way through a hulking plate of spanakopita; fusillades of spinach and feta offering a strange commentary on Vonnegut’s description of the futility of war. Despite what Zone 2 dinner parties would have you believe, you can’t eat and talk about books at the same time.
The book club has evolved – and not necessarily for the better. Yes, there was something intoxicating about rocking up to any event I wanted to, MeetUp-enabled, dropping into a conversation and submitting total strangers to the delights of my ‘ideas’ but nowhere felt like home. Somewhere, though, I was convinced there was a place for me, and I was developing a better idea of what to look for.
I like non-fiction, but talking about novels is better as you can always just deflect to your own vibe (‘I just didn’t like it’) rather than dealing with brutal, awkward things like facts. Clubs with an administrator, a cracker of the reading whip, are good; someone with tact and no small twinkle of eye, keeping the selection of the books within a certain range and relevance. There is also no such thing as ‘like-minded people’ – learning this was vital, accepting it in my search even more so.
I thought I’d found my home when I joined one group of readers who, with no academic background, were reading Joyce’s Ulysses, and talking about it in a Toby Carvery every month. These literary mountaineers were taking on their Everest with only some light bites from the Toby Tasters menu as support. Awed by the way they extracted actual laughs from that great tangled masterpiece, I was nonetheless aware that this was their journey, not mine. Plus, the train times made it tricky.
Eventually, I found my club: no concept, no nonsense, just a bunch of jovial, intelligent folk who meet monthly in a pub, led by a smart, cheerful man whose wife plays darts with her mates in the corner while we argue about whether 1984 is misogynist or not. He keeps a spreadsheet of all the books, ensuring ethnic and gender balance. He maintains quality and keeps abreast of literary fashions while not being a slave to them.
OK, it’s not a sofa, but I take my seat beneath a mock Victorian sign that says ‘What if the Hokey Cokey really IS what it is all about?’ and nod at the regulars: the man whose chief interest is recounting how he sourced the book (‘The local library didn’t have it, so I went into town; the traffic was terrible…’), and the reader who manages to relate every novel – even ones about life under a Stalinist dictatorship – to their own.
But that’s the deal. Social media lets us connect instantly but move on just as quickly. We think about ourselves ironically and about others, rarely. Book clubs, by contrast, compel us to lose ourselves twice: first in fiction, then in shared reflection. I like the thinking, the feeling, and the sharing.
