Do you belong to a book club? I've been a member of several over the years, and I have a very big soft spot for them.
Twenty five years ago I joined a book club in the village I was living in at the time. The members were made up entirely of mums from the local primary school and I'm not sure we could really call ourselves a book club. Certainly we did all read a book each month, but to be honest that was the extent of anything bookish that used to happen. We would meet at someone's house and enjoy a lovely meal, then we'd spend a maximum of ten minutes (no, I'm being generous, it was closer to five minutes) discussing the book, followed by several hours gossiping about the local schools, a decision about new curtains, how many bottles of wine was acceptable on a school night - you get the picture!
These days book clubs have evolved due to the wonders of the internet. We can join in with online book clubs and discuss our opinion of a book with people from all over the world, connecting through our love of reading. And there is also the concept of a 'readalong' where we can read a favourite book by a specific author at the same time as fellow fans, pausing every few chapters to discuss what we've just read. Similar to a book club, but in much smaller chunks and for a lot of people with a hectic modern lifestyle this is more manageable.
I am also once again in a physical meet-once-a-month book club. And shock horror, we spend the whole meeting discussing the book! Well, sometimes we may stray into a moan about the state of the pavements while super-fast broadband is installed in the village, but we all congregate from different walks of life with a wide age range, so it's nothing like the book club of decades ago. The best part of this book club - indeed all book clubs and readalongs - is hearing such different views about something we have all read. Often these differ from my own thoughts; our different backgrounds and life stories change the way a book speaks to us.
One of the most wonderful things about this book club is that we have a special library department to organise our chosen books, so we're all able to have a copy of the same book at the same time without having to purchase each one. I need no encouragement to buy books, but even I can see the wisdom of borrowing a book that I may turn out to not enjoy. And of course, every time a book is borrowed from the library the author gets a small payment - but that is a subject for another blog!
And in case you're interested, this month's bookclub book is The Fish Ladder by Katharine Norbury. It's part travelogue, part memoir and is very different (in a good way!) from anything I've read before.
