Why you should resist the lure of book clubs.

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Below is an article by Adam Sternbergh from the Reader's Digest. I think he's an ass but some of his points are interesting. There is a place online to debate the pros and cons of book clubs, I found a wonderful rebuttal from a lady that you would really like. It is copied at the end of this article......Enjoy....-S-




Reading is arguably the second most intimate human activity, and, as with the first most intimate human activity, there are people who will try to convince you it's better done in groups. These groups are called book clubs. I am in one. Maybe you are too. If so,here's why we've both made a terrible mistake.

In theory, there's much to recommend book clubs. They encourage reading. They enrich authors who, as you may have heard, are not particulary in the business of being enriched these days. They spur socializing, usually face to face-another valuable and endangered activity. The public book club- most notably, Oprah's or CBC's Canada Reads- has become an essential economic engine for the publishing industry. And the book club remains appealing to anyone who,like me, romanticizes long arguments over sonnets in smoky coffee houses. So it's not surprsing that our collective interest in book clubs is growing, even as our interest in reading shrinks.

As I mentioned, I am in a book club. It has four other members, all of whom I respect and who represent a spectrum of literary tastes. Our selections have ranged from 'Thomas Bernhard's 'The Loser' to Martin Amis's 'Money' to Peter Benchley's 'Jaws'. And like every book club, we do our book-club thing. We shuffle our schedules, We gather. We drink wine. We eat cheese. And we talk about the chosen book for a few obligatory minutes before we move on to the part of the club I think most of us really look forward to - which is not talking about the book.

You might contend that your club is different, that it has unsealed your eyes to new and exotic authors, and that you have great Risling-fuelled, soul-enriching debates that linger long into the night. That may be so. I don't doubt or begrudge you. But I should suggest that this fascination with book clubs-forming them, joining them, even chronicling them- is both antithetical to the enjoyment of reading and perfectly in keeping with our modern conviction that nothing is worth doing if it isn't immediately shared. Maybe it's posting photos of the family vacation on Facebook, or "tweeting" the details of your morning latte, or uploading a video of your wedding boogie to You Tube.

Now, I love a good wedding boogie,. But to suggest that the experienc of reading 'The House of Mirth" (a recent, well-received selection by my own book club) is intrinsically enhanced by subsequently talking about reading 'The House of Mirth" is to inply that reading 'The House of Mirth' is an experience that can be, and needs to be, enhanced. And I think most anyone who's ever read a book and loved it understands that's simply not true. If you read 'Moby Dick' while sailing the world alone, you would not enjoy it more.

Which brings us back to the intimacy of reading. Consider something even as silly and modest as this article: I'm in your head right now. You have graciously allowed me to slip inside the private sphere of your consciousness, if only for a few minutes. This is very different from how we experience any other kind of art: No matter how much you enjoy a painting or revel in a a symphony, there's not a sense that the painter has hijacked your eyes or the composer has hijacked your ears.

The writer, though, hijacks your thoughts. ('Hello,Hello! I'm making you say that right now.) The experience of reading so closely mimics the process of consciousness that it attains a unique level of artistic intimacy. Great art permeates the barrier of consciousness; reading obliterates it. It literally happens inside you. How's that for intimaty?

So if reading-in this sense of pleasurable invasion- is a sexual experience, then the book club is the equivalent of a locker room. It's the place where we gather to swap and compare notes after the fact, clumsily recounting the deed in a way that can't help but undermine and cheapen the very experience we've gathered to celebrate. Sure, it can be a fun way to burn off the occasional weeknight, but no one's going to mistake it for the act itself. And as we learn eventually, certain eperiences are better when you don't blabbing about them afterwards.

Was it good for you? Then that should be more than enough.

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Date: June 01, 2010
Name: Anne Thompson
Comments:
I was truly saddened, when I read Adam Sternbergh's article, "Between the Sheets- Why You Should Resist the Lure of Book Clubs", in the May 2010 RD. He has completely missed the point of the joy of discussing what you have learned in reading various books; seeing new perspectives from other people's input and sharing a love of reading. When he further likened a book club to the usual male preoccupations of "intimate relations" and locker rooms, it completely finished the article for me, as he has completely missed the point. When love is taken out of the equation, it leaves the starkness of the mechanics; which applies from reading to sex.
Quite frankly, I was really glad that he is not in my book club, which is an absolute delight, and a source of extremely insightful discussion.
His article reminded me of the interchange in the movie version of The Jane Austen Book Club, where one character states: "Men don't do book clubs; women want to share, but men hoard what they read, if they crack open a book at all..men, they pontificate, they keep monologuing and we can't get a word in edgewise..."
Essentially, the quality of your book club is predicated on the quality of its members...
Therefore, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that men don't do book clubs.