Book Clubs Anonymous: Why I Can’t Commit

by

Nicki Leone

I feel I must confess that I am skipping my book club meeting. While I am sitting here at the library table, trying to decide which of the two dozen books stacked on the floor I feel like reading next or writing about, my friends are gathering together in a living room somewhere, pouring wine, catching up on gossip, complimenting one other on the crab dip and bruschetta, admiring the new photographs of nieces and nephews and (in one case) grandkids. In about an hour they will begin talking about the book. They’ll all like it—our choice this month was Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons and there is nothing not to like about it. After another thirty minutes, the discussion will peter out and they’ll start talking about their jobs and their vacations. They’ll pick another book for next month—something that will appeal to a group of professional women who like the novels of Kaye Gibbons—and then they’ll leave one by one, with the happy memory of a pleasant evening.

I, on the other hand will have stayed at home, and once I finished writing this, will be turning my attention to a frightening Argentinian noir novel called A Distant Star about a psychopathic poet who writes verse in the sky with a plane. I didn’t dare suggest it to the group.

I’m sorry to say that I have a commitment problem. My track record with book clubs is terrible. I have started, joined, moderated and advised literally hundreds of book groups during my twenty-year career as a bookseller and book reviewer, but I have never managed to stick with one that lasted longer than a couple of years. “What is wrong with me?” I think. “They all love to read. These are smart women with interesting lives and interesting points of view. They are liberal and educated and open-minded. Why can’t I stick with it?” It is a character flaw, I admit, one that I seem unable to rectify. The flush of enthusiasm I feel when joining  a book club—All those new books to read! All those opportunities to talk about them!—eventually fades to complacency and sometimes even apathy. I start missing more meetings than I attend, and I start skipping the books we pick in favor of others we never would.

I can date the shift from excitement to indifference to a precise moment every time—when one of the people in the group says, as we discuss our next choice, “Oh, I won’t read books about _______.”  Feel free to fill in the blank. They don’t read science fiction. They don’t read books where children die. They don’t read books with graphic violence or sex. They don’t want dead dogs or gay characters or books that are all plot and no character. They don’t read books about, well, I suppose there is always something out there we don’t want to read. That first caveat becomes our first fence, and it isn’t long before others follow. We avoid the books where children die (there are a lot of these), then we avoid the books set in medieval Britain (“That’s just not my thing,” says one member), then we avoid anything that might be described as fantasy (“I just don’t see the point of fantasy when there are so many real stories.”). Soon we have a nice long reading list of books that are all the same, all carefully selected not to push anybody’s buttons, all “safe.”

I hate “safe.” I like my literature to wake me up, not lull me to sleep. Once a club starts playing it safe, my days with the group are numbered.

Aside from the excuse to sit around drinking wine, there are really two reasons that people join book clubs: They want to share the books they have loved with others, and they want to find new books they might not otherwise have discovered. Reading may be a solitary act, but storytelling is not—which is why readers have such a powerful compulsion to share books and say things like “You have to read this!” It is one of the first pieces of advice I give people in book clubs—suggest the books you can’t stop talking about, can’t stop thinking about.

The second piece of advice is “keep an open mind.” Because if you join a club to find books you would never have picked up on your own, then you had best be prepared to read outside your comfort zone—to read books about characters you don’t like, or about topics in which you’ve never been the least bit interested. Most book clubs start to decline when they stop acting like explorers in the land of literature, and start remaining behind their own self-imposed preferences.

Someone once asked me if there was anything I don’t read. “Diet books,” I quipped. Although in truth I can think of at least three diet books I’ve read in the past twenty years—Diet for a Small Planet, a book on Ayurvedic nutrition and the Atkins Diet book (the last of which I read rather the way you might read a horror story.)  Oh, there are subjects that are missing from my bookshelves—I’m not big on slasher fiction or military accounts or economic theory. Still, if I were to pull out the most unusual and memorable books I’ve read, many of them would be books that I would never have chosen myself—and all of them were picked up at the behest of someone else insisting that I read them.

So here are a few books that I wish my book club would read, even if none of them are particularly safe:

The Last Parallel by Martin Russ
This military memoir by a Marine during the Korean war is an amazing account not only of life on the front lines, but of the philosophical and spiritual issues that face a young man attempting to act with honor (or at least with some common sense) in a situation that even his commanding officers agree is utterly absurd.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Most book clubs refuse this delicious layer-cake of a story on the grounds that it is too long, and it has fairies and magic in it. Pish Posh. This is such a beautifully constructed Austenian pastiche that it is a pleasure to read just for the language alone; the gorgeously ornate alternate reality so meticulously constructed is icing on that layer cake, and the psychological insight and dry humor that sneak up on you at every turn make you hardly notice the hundreds of pages you are plowing through. I can honestly say that this is the only eight-hundred-page doorstop I’ve ever been tempted to read more that three times.

Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
As brief as the previous suggestion is lengthy, Morality Play is a medieval murder mystery of sorts. A troupe of twelfth century players comes to an inn and, in need of funds, decides to put on a performance. But the old stock of morality plays they are used to performing garner little interest (and little in the way of renumeration.) So instead, the troupe leader talks them into creating a new play out of an incident that recently occurred in the town—a young boy was found murdered, and the local midwife has been accused of killing him. As the players ask questions, however, they realize that there are truths and there are Truths. The troupe knows how to dramatize allegory. Reality is more elusive. Their new play brings in a larger audience, but not everyone who comes to the inn is there to see the play performed.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
I’ve written about my rediscovery of The Great Gatsby. The best lesson that re-reading that book taught me was that I needed to re-read most of the classics I was force-fed in high school, because in high school I had no idea what I was reading. Wuthering Heights, read the second time around as an adult was shocking, almost painful. What I had vaguely remembered as a melodramatic love story turned out to be a furious condemnation. It is possibly the angriest book ever written in English and to this day I have to read it in very short pieces, because it is just too intense to bear otherwise.

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
I wish every place had a chronicler like New York City has had in Joseph Mitchell. This book is a massive collection of forty years’ worth of essays, reporting and journalistic ruminations that does as much to memorialized the changing character of the city as Berenice Abbot’s photographs. There is no real plot, of course. No storyline. Nothing but a long paean to a hundred little neighborhoods and the eccentric characters who find refuge within. But it is stylistically beautiful writing—writing that is almost like painting—evocative and contemplative, and always generous and compassionate.

Babel-17 by Samuel Delany
Delany, one of my favorite (and most challenging) writers, explores the nature of language to reality in this short, intense and action-packed novel. Set on an indeterminate planet in the indeterminate future, “Babel-17” is a military code name for a series of radio transmissions that flood the airwaves right before some act of sabotage occurs in the war-torn society. Cryptographers have analyzed the transmissions with no success, so the military seeks the help of Rydra Wong, a poet who has a knack for languages and seeing patterns. She realizes that Babel-17 isn’t a code at all, but a language unto itself—an incredibly beautiful and precise language that is able to break down the most complex concepts (or machines) into descriptions of only a few words. As she learns more of Babel-17, Wong becomes obsessed with discovering who would speak such a language, especially after she realizes that the language has no word for “I.”

So there you are—six months’ worth of reading for any daring book club. Six books that have all been consistently rejected by various reading groups because they were too long, too fantastic, too unusual, too uncomfortable. Or, simply “not our kind of thing.”

Oh yes they are—you just don’t know it yet. And that is my third and last piece of advice for book clubs; if you want your club to last, then always remember that Subject is not as important as Style. The only thing interesting about the Korean War is what Martin Russ finds interesting in it. Because ultimately, what matters isn’t what a book is about; what matters is what the writer is trying to say.


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.