I’m no expert on book clubs, but I’ve been a part of a few and (as always) I have opinions.
- It’s better with friends.
It’s not easier with friends, but it’s way more fun if you have book-loving friends and can convince them to join you. I, personally, have amazing, book-loving friends. But getting them to commit to reading one book a month and jumping on a Zoom together? Nearly impossible, even with liberal application of guilt and bribes.
- One hour is not enough.
For me, book clubs are literally an excuse to hang out with people that love books and to talk about a shared topic and—if a community book club—make new friends. Know what you can’t do in just one-hour a month? Literally any of that.
- A good moderator makes or breaks the experience.
I’m an opinionated brat, so I have no trouble just chatting, but I also understand that a more structured, moderated book club has it’s benefits. What I actively loath is a moderator that walks over the members. One book club (that I shall no name) was led by a woman we shall call Sally. This was literally called Sally’s Fiction Book Club and she had been running it for, like, eleven years. She picked (most of) the books. She came with the questions. And she committed us to following those questions.
Also, if she had an opinion, it was stated as fact. When pressed (for example, I tried to follow-up to see if her factoid had been something the author said specifically or just an online consensus) she will not clarify. She’s also very, very bad at cycling through the group. Of the ten-ish people present, she would answer her own question, she’d solicit one or two other answers, and then she’d get distracted and skip everyone else before she remembers she has more questions and will continue.
At least I discovered a great indie bookstore out of that experience.
- I occasionally kind of hate their recommendations.
And I don’t mean “I read the book and just didn’t like it,” I mean “That’s just a crappy suggestion and I refuse to read it.” Does that make me a brat? Yes. Is it my truth? Also yes.
It doesn’t help that I mostly know what I like and mostly want to read that specifically. I’m not really looking to “read outside my comfort zone.” Ideally, I’d just discover people who accidentally are reading the exact same thing I am and we can just talk about it (one of my coworkers and I had a very specific, very indulgent sub-genre in common and I love her for it).
Sometimes I’ll read it. Sometimes I’ll skip it but attend, because I was never going to read it anyways but I can still socialize. And sometimes I’ll decide the book club and I are just not good fits and will never return.
- Fellow readers that like thinking about a book critically are amazing.
Books clubs, in my experience, tend to attract the sort of reader who is willing to analyze a book. Like it or hate it, for the most part they’re open to talking about things like prose, story structure, character development, and themes. These are my favorite kinds of discussion and I’m so grateful every time I meet someone who’s willing to say more than “I liked it.”
Or, even if it the discussion really is that simple, at least an “I liked it because.” Ever since I got called out for that in senior year of high school, I get it. In addition to learning about the “don’t want to yuck your yum” sentiment, I appreciate when I can elaborate on what didn’t work for me but for someone who likes X or Y the book might be great.
(It’s even more surreal when I have the exact same opinions on the elements of a book but the opposite conclusion, though. I’m thinking of Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, which I hated, but I had the same objective opinions as the lovers of the book for most of it.)
- Sometimes you read an amazing book you’d never previously heard of.
I find that this isn’t common but it happens often enough that it makes book clubs and the “obligated reading” worth it, just for the chance that it will.
For example, there was an absolutely 0% chance that I would have heard about The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, Adriana Hunter (translator) if it hadn’t been a book club pick. It’s just not a genre I read broadly enough to keep up with new(ish) releases, it’s translated which makes it less marketed in the US, and it’s close enough to the literary fiction genre that I would have been turned off of it. But it was phenomenal and so different than my usual.
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I’m sure there’s a ton more pros and cons, but that’s the majority of my thoughts. For now, I’m off to quickly finish off this month’s book club pick—A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, which was also recommended by a friend!—before Monday! I’m cutting it a bit close, but I’m confident I can do it!