You are a reader. You enjoy the elegant construction of words and the transport of the imagination. You like mysteries and fables, tales of obsession and angst, heartbreaking memoirs and the occasional romance. You may read alone, but there are myriad of you - housewives and lawyers, bartenders and nurses, professors and modern dancers - and you crave community. You want to share readerly opinions, respects, inspirations - plus dessert and a good bottle of wine, or two.
Your answer: the book club.
Many of you already know this, are already sharing a communal text and bandying about literary ideas and social commentary once or twice a month. But, still more of you are wondering how, why, where to find a diverse and interesting group to join up with or to inaugurate. Here's the scoop.
The book club is a complex and intriguing entity. Part salon, part social club, the book club can bring together close friends or new acquaintances in a manner that uniquely creates an intellectual, if not always like-minded, bond. Reading a single text - be it novel, memoir, historical fiction, short story collection, poetry - and sharing divergent thoughts, can allow the members of a book club to stimulate the brain and the emotions, in a manner not common in our everyday existence.
Connie Weaver, who heads up the Log Cabin Literary Center's "Be Aware the Ides of March" book club gathering, has been involved in a Boise Cascade book club for over 25 years. She is someone who, as a lifetime reader, knows the value of getting together with friends and workmates, amongst whom she counts herself the veteran member.
"For people who love to read," she says, "the next step is discussing what they've read. Add in a little background about the author, the history of the period, and a bit of food and you have the most enjoyable time. Even though we read for pleasure, we all seek the opportunity to learn. Whether it involves another culture, a social issue, history, or a new author, we want more knowledge."
If you are considering joining a book club, the Log Cabin's Ides of March gathering (March 15) will be a fine place to get information on established and upstart groups. As well, Barnes & Noble and Borders offer a number of options. There is also the Internet, where a multitude of online book clubs reside, and where you need only do the simplest of searches to yield a ton of information.
If you are looking to form your own book club, gather five, eight, ten acquaintances together for coffee and dessert, or - depending on who you know - beer and French fries, or martinis and cigars. When you get together, you should discuss what it is you'd like to get out of the endeavor. Then you can form a general list of books you think would be good to read, choose one and set a date (a month or so out) to meet again. As a general rule, genre books - i.e. sci-fi, romance, who-done-its - don't work as well as more literary, character-driven fiction, or thought-provoking nonfiction. This is because "literary" books will usually offer more than plot, more than circumstance and drama. Books like Anne Patchett's Bel Canto (last year's "What if everyone in Boise read the same book" selection), or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (the cu rent Oprah Book Club selection) engage serious, resonant, discussable ideas. Bu of course, it's your book club. Decide what you will.
Once you have settled on a text and have read it, it's helpful to do some prep work before you meet again. Form a list of questions - "What aspects of the main character do you admire or distrust?" "What symbolisms are at work in the text?" "What are the social implications of the book?" "What did you respect most about the writing?" etc. You can also do some biographical research on the author or seek out literary criticism on the text. You might research the place or subject matter of the book. You might examine how this book fits into the author's body of work. If you come armed with enhanced methods of examining and discussing your club's chosen book it can only help spark the discussion.
On top of all this, your group might want to think about creating themed meals, cocktails or desserts that relate to the setting of the book, or the ethnicity of the author.
Shauna Doerr, a Boise book clubber, and wife of author Anthony "The Shell Collector" Doerr, speaks highly of her group here in town. "The thing I really liked the most about the club," she says, "is that when I joined half the people were really good friends of mine and half the club I hadn't met. It's all women, early thirties, and it was a great opportunity to meet new people at a time in life when it gets a little harder to make new friends."
Doerr continues, "I guess our club is mostly an excuse for us ladies to get together and talk and eat dessert and drink wine. We spend a lot of time catching up, and not a ton of time talking about the book. Almost everyone has small children, so it's a great girls' night out."
Though much of the value of the book club lies in its easy social capacity, it seems the discordant and charged discussions have their place, too.
"Some of our best discussions have come to light when members of the group were strongly divided about the book," Weaver says. "Some came to the defense of the author or the protagonist, others stood their ground on the opposite side."
Doerr concurs, "In our group no one is afraid to speak up if they just couldn't get through a book, and I'm not sure we have had a club where everyone has read the whole book yet."
The pursuit of knowledge, camaraderie, and sustenance is what the book club is all about.
Article copyright Bar Bar Inc.
Photograph (It's never too early to cultivate a love of the book)
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