We should start a book club. Cancel all other co-curricular activities and take up reading. Everyone’s doing it.
Oprah has a book club. Luce Blakiston (Young NZer of the Year) has a book club. Reese Witherspoon and RuPaul both have book clubs. There’s one in Havelock that’s so prestigious and popular someone will have to die before a spot opens up. My aunt in Gizzy is part of one that subscribes to the Book Discussion Scheme, which is older than me and services over a thousand NZ book clubs.
A book club is just what I need, heading into winter, with a tsundoku habit that needs justifying and on the lookout for a wholesome excuse to start drinking again.
Problem is I may have forgotten how to read. Sure I remember the decoding bit: the diphthongs, digraphs and eight different ways to pronounce ‘ough’. Now I need to relearn the literature part.
Contrary to popular belief, social media is fanning the flame of novel mania, rather than extinguishing it. Scrolling is killing our ability to focus for the hours it takes to actually read something like Ulysses, but digital platforms are making books cool again with cozy corners of the interweb named BookTok and Bookstagram. There’s been a significant uptake of people searching out The Bell Jar, The Secret History, 1984, Wuthering Heights because some cute guy performative-reading a battered tome while sipping matcha just went viral.
I am pretty determined to get serious about novels again. I loved getting lost in Narnia, or sailing to Wild Cat Island with Nancy, or homesteading in Wisconsin with Laura and Pa. Now though, it’s taking a concerted effort to get back into books. And because a book club with only one member is just reading-a-book-and-talking-to-myself, I’m going to share my tips so we can commit to this together.
First: reading the lines on the page isn’t what makes a novel interesting. We must read between and behind the lines. (I’m not making this up, by the way, I learnt it at teaching school). This is where our imaginations come in, our research skills, our lived experience, our ability to infer beyond the literal, our interrogation of bias and agenda.
If we really are taking this seriously (and we must) we’ll set ourselves some questions. This will be impossible, of course, because we haven’t yet read the novel. But AI will help. We’ll prompt Claude with: Act as an English teacher, set five open questions for a student reading (insert novel title here) that can be answered in the first 50 pages. That’ll spit out excellent goals that can focus our reading. The trick is to consciously go looking for the answers. The hunt will propel us forward.
Now, we have to focus. We can have a cuppa at the ready, but no phones, no TV-on-in-the-background, no making-dinner-at-the-same-time. Just us and the novel. This is first-date territory. Stay present to the stories unfolding. Get to know the characters. Listen to what they are telling you. Form mental pictures and work hard to do this because these are the people, the places and the predicaments we’re going to be stuck with for the next week and a half. (Average adult reading speed: 250wpm = 3.5 hours for Of Mice and Men, for example).
Next tip: silent sustained reading. Remember this from Standard 4? Sit down (or curl up) and commit to those first 50 pages. Once we’re that far in, there’ll be no stopping us.
Extra for Experts: 8 out of 10 readers recommend ‘tabbing’, an annotation system that ensures active engagement with the text. Yes we did this at uni but now people are tabbing the latest romantasy or the new Elizabeth Strout. Using coloured sticky tabs, we assign colours to categories: red might denote plot twists, blue quotable quips, green world-building details, black obscure references we don’t understand but will wikipedia later.
Tabbing is going to make book club a lot more interesting because we’ll have material to fuel our intellectual discussions. Potentially, it’ll also help turn those discussions into a drinking game! But I may have to fine tune that idea before our first meet-up.
Last tip: don’t take it so seriously that it becomes another bore-chore. Reading a novel is supposed to be fun and relaxing. It’s there to give us a place to go without leaving the comfort of our own couch. A way to be selfish and virtuous in equal measure. It allows solitude without loneliness … empathy for what’s unknown and unfamiliar without actually having to talk to strangers.
A novel can be a lens through which we can see or re-see the world. A microscope and a telescope, and a reality-bending kaleidoscope with which we can study the minuscule and the massive, the tectonic and the trivial. Anything other than our own navels.
It doesn’t need to be weighty or lofty, it just needs to invite us in and give us things to think about, and perhaps talk about over a whiskey-mac every other Wednesday all through winter.
I recommend the following 12 novels to try out in the next year, all under 50k (wordcount) and all well worth your time, effort and attention. Let’s meet back here next May and swap notes (#BayBuzzBookClub):
1. Great Gadsby
2. Cannery Row
3. Wasp Factory
4. Tangi
5. Small Things Like These
6. Passing
7. Here At The End Of The World We Learn To Dance
8. Mrs Dalloway
9. Olive Kitteridge
10. Tuck Everlasting
11. Seascraper
12. Animal Farm
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