Books talk to one another. I say that a lot. The Brothers Karamazov, A Christmas Carol, Frankenstein, No Country for Old Men, East of Eden, A Dolls House and now Antigone all had dramatic effects on history, and often struggle with one another. Talking about them, your personal experience with them and what you might have learned about their place in history can be incredibly expansive. Expansive of your understanding of history and literature, but also of yourself, your place in the world and the relationships you have in it.
I can be obnoxious. I get that. If you run into me at the store, job site or at a party I am going to inelegantly steer the conversation to the book we’re reading for the book club. The clerk at the grocery store has started asking me up front, so I don’t have to shoe horn the conversation into, “Do you want a bag today?”
I find I gets one of two responses when I start a conversation about being in a book club. Either the person says, “Oh, okay.” , and that is that. Or, it turns into a 20 minute conversation, and I am humbly surprised by how many 20 minute conversations I have gotten into. Its an unexpected benefit to this whole book club project, that books seem to open doors towards meeting new people and expanding relationships. My personal project has become quite social.
It’s has gotten me thinking that reading is a more extroverted pass time from what our culture seems to project it as. Books aren’t just stories, they are ideas and experiences. In our book club we try and pick books that are historically formative, that help inform how the world has become what it is today. They connect to our present concerns without drowning us in the noise of the modern media buzzsaw, but not escaping it either. We aren’t looking away, we unplug the buzzsaw and lay out its pieces, talk about how the parts relate and how they might clash with one another.
The best part of the book club experience is that we often don’t agree. Don’t agree that the book was good, or it may have been well written but was harmful or misunderstood or deceptive. Which is okay, but we don’t merely get to disagree. At our best we get to understand, and for me that is a more wonderful connection than mere agreement. Understanding is a person you get to see, while agreement or disagreement is just keeping score. I’m tired of keeping score, that’s such a lonely pass time.
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