A Great Book Club
Uncategorized — Posted on December 8, 2008 at 7:26 am
Glad to be back. I’ll be happy to share anecdotes from our vacation this week, but this morning I’m diving right back into things.
I read two articles this weekend that got me thinking about a couple of things. I have been part of the Oakland Book Club since its inception this summer. However, I have been decreasingly compelled to read the book selections as it has progressed.
We started with House of Leaves by Mark Denielewski. Though it led to an interesting discussion, it hasn’t left any real impact on me save perhaps a distaste for post-modernism in literature.
I actually enjoyed Little Children by Tom Perrotta (more than the movie, I must say, despite glimpses of Kate Winslet’s flesh), but I can’t justify repeated doses of pop fiction. I couldn’t get through The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and I couldn’t even get through the movie, despite the titular promises of titillation.
I was promised that Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff by Christopher Moore would be hilarious, but I didn’t find it so and abandoned it after several chapters. When October and November came around, I just couldn’t see what I was going to get for my troubles.
Sunday, I read an article about Book Clubs in the New York Times. Aside from being an amusing look at the phenomenon of book clubs, it talked about why people join and, perhaps more interestingly, why people leave book clubs.
JOCELYN BOWIE was thrilled by the invitation to join a book group. She had just returned to her hometown, Bloomington, Ind., to take an administration job at Indiana University, and thought she had won a ticket to a top echelon. “I was hoping to network with all these women in upper-level jobs at I.U., then I found they were in the book group,” she said. “I thought, ‘Great! They’ll see how wonderful I am, and we’ll have these great conversations about books.’ ”
Ms. Bowie cannot pinpoint the precise moment when disillusion replaced delight. Maybe it was the evening she tried to persuade everyone to look beyond Oprah Winfrey’s picks, “and they all said ‘What’s wrong with Oprah?’ ” she said.
Or perhaps it was the meeting when she lobbied for literary classics like “Emma” and the rest of the group was abuzz about “The Secret Life of Bees,” a pop-lit best seller.
The last straw came when the group picked “The Da Vinci Code” and someone suggested the discussion would be enriched by delving into the author’s source material. “It was bad enough that they wanted to read ‘Da Vinci Code’ in the first place,” Ms. Bowie said, “but then they wanted to talk about it.” She quit shortly after, making up a polite excuse: “I told the organizer, ‘You’re reading fiction, and I’m reading history right now.’ ”
This got me to thinking what I really want out of a book club: relevance. I’m not particularly interested in reading for the sake of reading. I want to learn something and have it make an impact in my life. I don’t really know how to discuss books, per se, but I do enjoy discussing the world.
I would get up early to read, if the books pertained to current events, like Team of Rivals or The Best and the Brightest, that Frank Rich discussed in his Sunday column. I would read Great Books that I’ve missed, like Proust, Twain, Melville, Kant or more Shakespeare. But as it stands–and please don’t infer any disrespect felt towards those running the Oakland club, who are dear friends–I just can’t make the time to read a lot of this fiction.
I will, however, make a worthy exception for Chris Barzak’s The Love We Share Without Knowing.
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9 Comments
You missed the November pick, which was a non-fiction book, about the writer in Akron who bought the condemned mansion and spent a decade renovating it.
I can understand where you’re coming from, but I think I would leave the sort of book club that the woman you quoted desires: history books don’t seem to really leave much on the table for discussion, other than to say, I found such and such a thing interesting, and then putting it back down on the table after admiring it. Fiction, on the other hand, questions, and leaves room for readers to question. I think they just do different things, fiction and non-fiction. I feel like I learn different things from fiction than non-fiction. With non-fiction, I feel like I learn facts about a particular topic, but I feel talked at, rather than invited to observe and come to my own conclusions. Fiction does the other thing, where what I’m learning is how to observe and come to conclusions on my own about a subject matter, and whatever the subject is, it comes through characters, people, which provides a more inviting backdrop for me, to see what all those ideas the writer is really writing about look like on the ground, so to speak.
I hear what you’re saying and appreciate your perspective. What I find compelling about history is that it’s always happening. So, I can read The Power Broker, for example, and not just be impressed with Robert Moses’s life and times but draw comparisons with current political leaders and discuss what was admirable and less admirable about his accomplishments and approaches. I can also talk about Robert Caro’s writing and research.
And even in the case of apolitical biographies and histories there are things to learn and conclusions to draw about how decisions and actions are applicable to your own circumstance.
In conversations that I have with other people, I draw more topics for discussion from histories and biographies than any fiction I’ve read. The best thing I get from fiction, it seems, is entertainment and a look at different writing styles. Certain books and authors have, to be sure, proven exceptions. And in those cases, the characters and their journeys speak to me with great interest and relevance. I would like to find more of those and, of course, folks to share it with.
You might enjoy historical fiction that is not written simply for entertainment purposes alone. A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower comes to mind. And she packs her novels full of lectures on linguistics, politics, history, biology, and 19th century literature. It’s really the work of genius. She also wrote a novel about a biographer, which I thought was really funny and ironic, about how biography in the end is really a fiction in an of itself, because the process of fiction is the same process used in history and biography. It’s selecting details and arranging them in a certain way to give your reader a certain idea about the subject at hand. Which is the same thing in fiction’s process really.
In any case, on going to the article on book clubs and reading it more closely, I see that this woman you quoted actually wasn’t reading history, but just said so. Sounds like what she really wanted was a more high-brow book club, is all. I found the stereotypical book club member section of the article (with the people who always relate the story back to their own life, or who hate a book because it’s either too literary or not literary enough) hilarious, and frustrating. Hilarious because it’s true, and frustrating because it’s true.
I did a book signing in Cleveland last week, and this group of ten twenty and thirty somethings who had read my first novel together came to see me. I think I’m going to work on putting our two book clubs together for an evening in the spring or summer, when the weather is better. Two of them are from Youngstown. One still lives in Austintown. They were a lot of fun, and smart readers.
Indeed that was the part of the article that resonated:
“Sometimes there is a rambler in the group, whose opinion far outlasts the natural interest of others, or a pedant, who never met a literary reference she did not yearn to sling.”
Or someone “who turned every meeting into [one's] own personal therapy session.”
You’re right, I have enjoyed historical fiction. Notably The Company.
On the whole, I think that the Oakland Club’s selections (none of which I’ve chosen)have been pretty diverse as far as fiction goes. The discussion of Duras’s The Lover was quite interesting and fruitful, partly because of the historical perspective: the complications of a relationship between a poor white girl and a wealthy Chinese man in 1940s French Indochina. I also didn’t find the Christopher Moore book more than moderately funny, but I enjoyed his literary approach. I think there were some really interesting things going on in Moore’s retelling of the Jesus story, especially in the crucifiction section. House of Leaves didn’t change my life, but I’m glad I’ve read it.
I was actually relieved to see that what I find somewhat annoying about book club stems from what, from the article you linked, seem to be fairly typical member behaviors like oversharing of personal history, not reading the book and continually derailing the conversation, etc. I also think that the observation of differing lifestages of members is spot on. There is in our book club about a 30 year age range among members. Like you, I connected to the parents in The Little Children, but other non-parent or younger members probably didn’t relate in the same way.
However, I would hesitate to say place a higher value on one genre of writing than another. Fiction is historical, symbolic, interpretive, and reflective. Just today, Miranda asked me what a book is called that is historically accurate but centers around made-up characters. I explained to her that this was a genre called historical fiction (and I heartily second Chris’s Byatt recommendation). I will say that it can be difficult discussing fiction if one doesn’t have a literary background, perhaps, especially is one is in the company of a bunch of lit heads.
I’m all for adding something other than fiction to the line up; that’s why I solicited member suggestions at the September meeting. David Giffels’s book was a pleasant change, but it was also the meeting with the worst book club attendance so far. I don’t know if this indicates a preference for fiction, or if it was just a bad night.
I completely understand the time constraints, and remember my rule. If something that takes me away from my kids isn’t rewarding 70% of the time, it’s not worth it to me. I’ll keep you on the list, and if a title interests you, come on out. If not, we’ll miss your company.
Thanks, Kris. The people are, of course, the best part of book club!
I would like to suggest my book for reading, Checkered Fences. My website is http://www.eloquentbooks.com/CheckeredFences.htm. Thanks for your interest.
Oh, and re: Kate Winslet’s flesh, honey, those weren’t glimpses!
Fair enough. I am trying to throttle the lasciviousness here on the blog :-)