Consider the situation: Five attractive, energetic peo-ple spend the summer together. The group includes a physician, three writers and an amateur singer- three men and two women. They take daily walks by the lake; they swim; they sail; they amuse one another with stories about mutual acquaintances back home; they argue about the latest controversies in the news; and at night, in front of a blazing wood fire, they read aloud together-German ghost stories, mainly, but also poetry.
Such was the book group, if we may so call it, that assembled in 1816 on the shores of Lake Leman near Geneva: Dr. John Polidori, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Having estab-lished their small community, these men and women did what they loved: They read together and talked avidly about their reading. Since this was a group heavily populated by writers, it is not surprising that these conversations inspired them to write: The most famous product of that lively conversation is Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”
If our book groups are neither so lively nor so literarily pro-ductive as the Shelleys’, never-theless the desire for sociable ease, fellowship and pleasure in books and in each other ani-mates many a book group. For some, book groups offer an alternative to and relief from what Chicago writer Ted Fish-man calls “the task of absorbing the info smog.” Noting the rapid expansion of the Chicago Public Library’s Adult Book Discus-sion Series, Jim Pletz, the library’s director of adult services, says people are eager to find in book groups “a non-threatening but stimulating environment.” Yet the contemporary book-group phenomenon raises certain questions, not the least of which is: Why read?
In his book “The Company We Keep,” critic and University of Chicago professor emeritus Wayne Booth describes reading as offering a special kind of friendship. The reasons for reading are, of course, many: One reads for information, escape, amusement, edification, sedation, elation, distraction. But among the more profound things books may offer is fellowship, even a provisional cure for loneliness. One reads in hopes of being addressed.
Serious reading–that is, reading seriously–involves us in a strange relationship. When we read with focused intent, we withdraw (however briefly) from the social world, from friends, family, chores, work. We seek out in some books, for a few hours or minutes, a peculiar kind of companionship. The freedom to sink into a book may be, in some cases, the freedom to sink into the self. In his book “A History of Reading,” Alberto Manguel says that when he was a child, reading gave him “an excuse for privacy.” The person immersed in a book wraps himself in a fragile cocoon: The physically immobile body of the reader belies the movements and metamorphoses of his mind.
The privacy, silence and stillness that reading may require or even protect carry with them some taint, especially in such a coercively sociable, active and noisy culture as ours. How many parents have regarded their bookish sons and daughters with a mixture of worry and pride: Shouldn’t they go out and play, get their noses out of those books? Isn’t there something unhealthy, even unnatural, about that kind of absorption? Doesn’t a love of reading suggest a resistance to living?
Such stereotypes as the bookworm, the egghead and the absent-minded professor reveal populist misgivings about the potentially antisocial nature of reading. But as Manguel illuminates in his book, the activity of reading used to be a more communal, vocal affair: It wasn’t until the 10th Century that the practice of reading silently became widespread in the West. Before that, to read was to vocalize aloud, usually in company. Of course, the meaning of and access to reading were one thing for a 9th Century monk reading aloud as he transcribed Scripture alongside his fellow monks, but are quite another thing for a first-generation Dominican-American woman reading Jamaica Kincaid’s novel “Lucy” on the elevated train in 1998.
Readers, if they are fortunate, discover themselves to be part of the community envisioned by the book. Books imagine their readers, sometimes explicitly, as in Jane Eyre’s triumphant declaration in the closing chapter of Charlotte Bronte’s novel: “Reader, I married him.” Every writer, even as apparently retiring a poet as Emily Dickinson, forecasts for her work some human reception. “This is my letter to the World,” Dickinson declared, “That never wrote to me . . . Sweet–countrymen–/Judge tenderly of me.” And indeed, her more publicly exuberant contemporary, Walt Whitman, concluded his “Song of Myself” with a promise to the reader: “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,/Missing me one place search another,/I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
Book groups allow us to read Whitman’s intimate address as a call to community. Unless we are going to consider the proliferation of book groups to be a sinister marketing ploy underwritten by Oprah Winfrey, book-of-the-month clubs and the publishing industry, the growth of such groups should make us wonder: Why read together? And further, what to read, and with whom? And how–that is, in what spirit–should or might a group read?
A book group offers its members an opportunity to move between private experience–the self’s encounter with the book–and collaborative reflection. Book groups return the reading experience to the social world: The imaginative dialogue between the reader and the book (or, to personalize the relation, between the reader and writer) becomes a polylogue in the living rooms and libraries and bookstores where book groups gather. This means that book-group discussions bring with them all the virtues and vices of social life. The pleasures and dangers of book groups arise from the same social condition: One has to deal with other people.
Who, exactly, those other people might be depends in part on the book group venue–library, bookstore, home–and on the imagined community presupposed by the group. The Chicago library offers a civic, public space for discussion; communities may coalesce (and have, according to Pletz) over time, but floating members and first-time visitors are welcome at any of the regularly scheduled meetings. The library discussions thus mirror the institution’s commitment to a literary public sphere: Citizens are free to participate as they wish, as members of the public. The citywide response has been so enthusiastic that Pletz expects 40 groups to be running throughout the city by May.
Pletz emphasizes the diversity of the people attending the discussion series and of the books chosen, which range–to judge from this year’s calendar of readings–from classic African-American texts to contemporary, first-time authors, from sociology to memoir to fiction. Those who attend privately organized book groups speak more often, if ruefully, of the homogeneity of their memberships. Surveying the explosion of such groups from her vantage as co-owner of St. Louis’ independent bookstore Left Bank Books, Kris Kleindienst wryly observes, “The groups seem to be all white or all black or all queer or all Unitarian or something.” And indeed, as health administrator Linda Shapiro says of the group she and I both attend, “We are all very much alike–all professional women, all white.”
We might say that if some book groups focus deliberately on books, others concern themselves more with the group. The complex social dynamics of book-talk move to the fore in those groups that meet in private homes, by invitation only. The people who establish home-based book groups need to combine the social facility of the most gracious host with the political savvy of a diplomat: Martha Stewart meets Henry Kissinger. Just as dinner parties can sink under the weight of too much similarity–everyone a lawyer, or a gardener, or a Democrat–so too book groups can suffer if personalities, jobs and views become either predictable or too similar. The artful invention of a book group makes one think of Noah populating his ark: two of each kind are welcome, but only two.
It is the minor scandal of some book groups that their members do not all actually read the assigned book. The discussions do not necessarily falter for that. Talking about books–even or especially the ones you’ve not read–offers its own particular pleasure. There may be, as many cultural doomsayers have observed, more readers of book reviews than of books. While this state of affairs may reflect the decline of literacy, publishing and civilized discourse, it is also the case that in a book group what may count more than completing the book (or even cracking it open) is the willingness of all those present to attend to and participate in the conversation inspired by the ostensible, even if unread, object at hand. Pletz notes that lively discussions often have the effect of encouraging laggards to take up the book on their own time. Book discussions are as much prospective, then, as retrospective: They influence what we might read as much as they reflect what we have read. Not that the book is read but that it is discussed well–this is, perhaps, the secret and paradoxical principle of book groups.
What exactly constitutes a good discussion is, of course, somewhat up for grabs. Pletz says that sometimes the library discussion groups focus on the book proper for only 15 or so minutes before veering happily into other topics: life experiences, related books, items in the news. By contrast, Fishman says that his all-men’s group maintains a “laser-like focus” on the chosen book: “Our discussions are very intense but not personal.” There is a fine line between conversation and chatter, and each group negotiates this line for itself.
In a book group you discover how others read, as well as how their reading coincides with and differs from your own. You can’t help noticing what people value and how they value what they value. You can’t help revealing yourself, or some parts of yourself, when you talk about a book you’ve taken seriously. That is why some of the best book-group discussions occur when some members passionately loathe a book. Being prepared to articulate just why you hated that novel, or why that book on urban planning bored you to tears, may force you to clarify the basis of your preferences. It is also true that many a book group fracas arises from an impasse of taste. What can bridge the chasm between the person who wants to read, say, Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” and the one who wants to read the latest Grisham novel? Here we see the enormous significance of the method of selecting books: Pletz and his fellow librarians and facilitators at the Chicago library come up with titles (they pay special attention to first-time authors), bring bags of books out to the branches, and pass out ballots to discussants; they also welcome nominations. Private groups may allow–or require–the host to choose a book; other groups (such as the one I attend) arrive at their next title through a protracted discussion at the end of each meeting. These procedures, however various, reveal the common project that a successful book group becomes: Invested in future discussions, mindful of past successes and lapses, members commit not only to reading but to the continuation of the group itself.
“The common reader differs from the critic and the scholar,” Woolf declared some 70 years ago. “He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.” The book-group member understands his reading pleasure to be both his own and dependent on others’. In an era when common readers are perhaps not so common, the book group helps to sustain Woolf’s vision of a community of engaged and curious readers. And if we do not all aspire to the violent seriousness of Franz Kafka’s reading dictum–“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us”–nevertheless through book groups we may create a common sea, a medium to move and think through, warmed by company as well as the book at hand.
