I’ve been invited to join an online book club and have politely declined. I even like some of the readers who already belong, but by nature I’m not a joiner of anything. As soon as an arrangement among friendly individuals becomes formalized – by that I mean, organized, with times and dates, rules and dues – I’m gone. Especially when it comes to books, I go it alone. A book club sounds too much like a Kaffeeklatsch, with schmoozing and small talk.
Around the time I got the invitation, a reader and I starting swapping favorite passages from Montaigne’s Essays. It started spontaneously and has no rules. It started when we exchanged thoughts about the death of siblings. He emailed this from “Of Experience,” Montaigne's final essay:
“Death
mingles and fuses with our life throughout. Decline anticipates death’s hour
and intrudes even into the course of our progress. I have portraits of myself
at twenty-five and thirty-five; I compare them with one of the present: how
irrevocably it is no longer myself! How much farther is my present picture from
them than from that of my death!”
I replied
with this from “That Our Happiness Must Not Be Judged Until After Our Death”:
“I leave it to death to test the fruit of my studies. We shall see then whether my reasonings come from my mouth or from my heart.”
I don't know that you can truly read with a group. I think you can with one other person - I have a friend that I read two books a year with (we're almost finished with this year's Trollope). We've read Conrad, Dickens, Dreiser, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Beckett, David Foster Wallace (a mistake, that one) and many others together, and I find it very enjoyable. But we know each other very well, and even then I wouldn't want to do more than we do that way.
ReplyDeleteBook clubs are okay with me if the books and members are right. I don't mind the social aspect that is part of such groups. Decades ago, I belonged to a reading group for about six years and found it enjoyable. In college, I was part of a philosophy department reading group led by one of the professors I liked. It was delightful.
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