The Platonic Ideal of Book Clubs

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From Bookriot:

I was in the perfect book club once. I know, I know, the perfect book club doesn’t exist, and it was probably only perfect for me. Since then, whenever I read a book and talk about it with other people, though, I want it to be like that.

I was living in Madrid, Spain, teaching English and constantly marveling at how unattached I was, unmoored – I didn’t know anyone. Sure, I skyped with people in the States still but realistically, I was one of those people that no one would be able to identify if they found me dead or something! I started joining clubs and events mostly to alleviate that feeling, not because I loved books.

Don’t get me wrong, I love books, but I have had negative interactions with discussions of “literature.” Most of the ones I’ve had were associated with classes and grades, which meant that people talked about books like they were writing a paper, like a performance rather than an exploration.

. . . .

In the perfect book club, though, I met really interesting people who had been meeting every month in an old coffee shop/bar in Madrid for years; the group was as small as 4 sometimes and as big as 12 other times.

. . . .

The people found a way to bring every part of the discussion back to the book: While it wasn’t a rule, we didn’t really discuss outside affairs, our personal lives, how the book related to us or our experiences specifically. I know some people love that, but I really liked that we stayed in the “world” of the books most of the time; it made occasional bits of personal information seem really important, not like someone was trying to sidetrack us into talking about his or her life.

Everyone either read the book or admitted they didn’t and spoke little: This wasn’t a book club that pretended to read the book in order to hang out with each other (that’s another kind of fun club, but I don’t think it’s really a book club).

Link to the rest at Bookriot

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