Saturday 1 April 2023

I love book clubs!

 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.



2 comments:

  1. I love the way book clubs get you reading things you might not have chosen for yourself. I'm not in any right now, but have been in the past.

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  2. I love book clubs too, Clare – both face-to-face and online. Like you, I find it fascinating how characters speak to readers in different ways. My face-to-face book group friends have introduced me to new authors and also stretched my reading, introducing me to biography and memoir. The Fish Ladder sounds just their kind of read. Enjoy!

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