Members
of The No-Pressure Book Club
are forgiven for not reading
their books, or forgetting
to bring a
book to
a meeting, or not
attending
for months on end (life, you
know). This gives some
meetings a refreshing intimacy.
I
belong to a book club. Ours is not one of those portals to revelry,
where women end up drinking and dancing on tables to Belinda Carlisle
and forget to talk books. No. The No-Pressure Book Club really is
about literature, despite the fact that membership can be thin on the
ground at times.
We
set the bar low, in a good way. Launched about a decade ago by a
psychologist friend of mine (I guess the title gives that away), it's
a fluid, friendly association consisting of a few invited members. We
meet approximately once a month at a member's home, all contributing
a snack so as not to burden anyone with hostessing anxiety. We each
take one book we recommend or have heard is a worthwhile read (a
second-hand book is perfectly acceptable) and tell the others about
it. We like literary fiction and well-written, stimulating
non-fiction, and you can throw your used magazines into the ring too,
along with your pride, as there's usually a taker for those. We're
renowned for only reading the literary best-sellers once all the hype
has died down, usually two to three years after publication.
At
the No-Pressure Book Club, nobody takes offence if members don't have
time to read a book. For six months. Or forget to bring a book. Or
forget to attend a meeting because they're engrossed in an erotic
romance, and I don't mean a novel. There have also been long
stretches where members too distracted by, say, new love or a
white-knuckle life crisis, announce, 'No books for me; I'm just
taking a magazine this month'. It's all okay.
Book
clubs are a phenomenon here in South Africa as books are expensive; a
club allows members to share the cost of books. Typically, our club
consists of a small group of women, but we once had as a member an
American guy who was working in Cape Town for an NGO. The fact that
he looked like Barack Obama's hot younger brother and gave
intellectually rigorous analyses of the works of weighty US authors
kept attendance high. It was reminiscent of The Jane Austen Book
Club, though our man left after a year to take up a place at an
opera school in New York. He sang arias at his last book club
meeting.
We
have had marriages, pregnancies, births, divorces, mid-life crises,
illnesses – the best of times, the worst of times. Occasionally
there are only two of us at a meeting, my psychologist friend and me.
The Core, as we refer to ourselves, catch up on our lives over snacks
and tea. As my friend pondered at one of those intimate gatherings,
'I sometimes wonder if book club would continue if there was just one
of us.'
'Yes,
I think so,' I said. 'We're committed.'
'I
could do it,' she mused. 'I could make snacks and tea, as usual, and
hold book club for one. Write down which titles I'd taken out in the
little black book. Select some new ones from the stock.'
In
these times of Kindles and short attention spans, one must be
flexible.
For
me as a writer, it's also interesting to note how diversely people
read books. There are those members who doggedly read a book to the
end ('The author spent all that time writing it; they must have had
something important to say,' one member explained. Personally, I have
no qualms about abandoning a book if I run out of mood or feel the
plot is sagging, or dropping it on the second page if I suspect I
made a selection error). And there are those who glance at the last
page to see the ending – jokes! Nobody in our book club would ever
do that.
What
binds the members is that we like to read books and then discuss
them, turning a solitary activity into a shared experience. I
remember a member hovering over me as I surveyed the table of books
at a meeting, urging in a fervid whisper, 'Oh please, please read
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer. I need
someone to talk to about it. It got quite weird at the end and I need
to debrief.'
Which
explains why many women and some men across the country meet monthly
in this way: because humans love to sit down and be told a story by a
master storyteller, and in world where books are relocating from
paper to pixel, that's something that will never change.
Catriona
Ross is the author of several books, including the just-published
ebook, Story Star: How to write your first novel and use the
uncanny power of fiction to turn your wishes into reality.
Oh what a lovely blog post. It's brought back so many happy memories of the most fantastic book club.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget the 'country' member :-)