YOU know the feeling? It is Sunday. Tomorrow is the fourth Monday of the month and that means… but wait, there are still 350 pages to go! Arrrgh! – the tyranny of the book club. Either you stay up all night reading. Or you bluff. Or you are going to sit there saying nothing, which might be suspiciously out of character. Which is it to be? Face it – you are between a rock and at least two hard places.
Is it any wonder that men do not do book clubs? OK, let’s admit it, certain men do do book clubs. There’s the Lavender Literary Lounge, there’s Boys and Books, there’s Queers in Print, there’s Long Beach Gay Man’s Book Club and the Gentle Man’s Salon Reader – but none of the men I know would want to join those because, well, I guess they are a little far from Nicosia. But while others say haughtily that book clubs are a girl thing invented by the weaker vessel because she has too much time on her hands, for the most part I think it is largely because real men don’t need an excuse to get together and go out for a drink. Not reading a book does rather take the hard work out of it. There was just the one poor guy who said it was because the girls wouldn’t let him play… “Book clubs are like powder rooms. They sound great, only I’ve never been in one. But I know what’s going on. And I like it. You read a book a month. You talk about the characters, the themes, the writing — and how it all makes you think about your world, your experiences, your relationships. Sometimes the discussion is incisively literary; other times it wanders or becomes deeply personal. You sink your fork into a rich slab of chocolate cake and offer up something honest.” (Yeah, and then we get down to the serious business of complaining about our husbands… )
But how did he know all that? He is absolutely right of course and anyone who says he isn’t is lying. And you can take it from me because at the last count I belong to four, and that is as much reading as anyone can be expected to do in a month if she is not doing it for a living. And somehow they all conform to the description above while being absolutely distinct from each other, for example, the recipe for chocolate cake does vary quite a lot…
First of all there’s the one I call the Size Really Does Matter Club, which seems to hold that if the book is not at least 1,200 pages long and densely written by Orlando Figes or Simon Schama or someone equally capable of breaking the legs off your coffee table then it isn’t worth troubling Ruth Keshishian at the Moufflon to order it. Annan V would be much too short for them – even with all the annexes. Most of these women have day jobs as rocket scientists and are reading these brick-like tomes in their second language. They arrive with bits of research from the National Geographical magazine or possibly from sessions in the reading room of the British Library for all I know, together with maps and family trees and photographs of their mother’s second cousin who was distantly related to the author. And they say things like “It wasn’t until I read it for the fourth time that I realised…” Quite so. The best way to derive maximum enjoyment from a book group like this is to inveigle them into choosing the next five books from the category of “books Jane has already read”. This frees me to concentrate on the lovely people, the chocolate cake and all those books I have to read for the other groups.
Such as the “Great Intellectual Experience” one. This is run by a diplomat’s wife who has been furthering the objectives of her husband’s mission by running a one-woman cultural awareness programme about her country’s post war literature. If you think that sounds dry it isn’t. Excellent, mercifully short books that I would never have thought to read otherwise. We haven’t merely completed our first year we have jolly well graduated from it. I have never seen commitment like this. It is no good turning up to these meetings with the book still unread in your bag. Since we take it in turns to write an analytical paper for the group this means that every time we come together some saintly person has been slaving over the text for our general good and so the rest of us had better buck up and engage. We are organised to within an inch of our lives and now when you trip over those little stalagmites of books all over the floor of the Moufflon bookshop you’ll know why…
Then there is the group loosely known as the “Bugger it, No one has Really Read the Book but Let us Go to the Pub Anyway” circle. I appreciate this one, because, really, as with all of them, it is primarily about meeting up with each other. But this group is not afraid to admit that the book is secondary. And all of them are real readers and the books are never a pushover. But somehow we all have busy lives and are generally the living disproof that book groups exist as the invention of idle housewives. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. But as long as we are still on earth and can raise a glass we can at least read some of the book and drink all of the wine.
And fourthly? My absolute favorite: Book Club Lite. This one has very strict rules. Meet about seven nights a week in my bed. Book not prescribed by any other book club. Reading more than half-way down the first paragraph is entirely optional. No wine. No chocolate cake. Only one lady member……..…zzzzzz
