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LETTER FROM LONDON |
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SEE IN LONDON:  "Thank you for coming to today's meeting of the Twickenham Book Club. Our speaker is Mr. Michael Johnson, who will discuss the critical social issues in Kathleen Windsor's 'Forever Amber' and their relevance to our civilization today..." |
How to read your way
Up the status ladder
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
A new self-help craze for grownups is sweeping Britain and the United States. Sorry to seem so elitist, but for the purposes of this column I’ll call it the “Let’s learn to read” clubs.
They are for adults, mostly for women, sometimes for aspiring intellectuals. In Britain they tend to be heterosexual and they serve as a convenient cover for singles on the make. Whatever happens later, reading and talking about books is always the starting point--but rarely the only point--in these clubs.
My own daughter, a Boston suburbanite, says, “Almost every woman I know belongs to a book club.”
I must declare my bias. I cannot imagine anything more ghastly than sitting around in a circle spouting my opinions of Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou while the others mentally grade me. I already did my college seminars and certainly have no desire to suffer through that again. Also, I thought it was okay to read just for pleasure at my age (50-plus).
All the way over here in London we are aware of this person called “Oprah” and her power to sell books. Her book club website come-on is revealing: “From fitness to fantasy, marriage to money--we’ve got them all!” (Er, is that “all”?) I gather some bookstores even pile up Oprah books in a special display, and publishers now bind in study guides to help the tongue-tied get started in their own neighborhood discussion groups.
As a U.S. club veteran said to me, describing one such group: “You wouldn’t want to be a fly on that wall. If the book has a paragraph about marriage, they ended up talking about their husbands.” Most of the members never get to the end of the books. “We’re really just meeting to have martinis,” the leader confided to her.
In Britain we have our own version of Oprah, the appalling TV talk show double act called “Richard and Judy.” Their daytime show includes a brief discussion of some minor novel interspersed with gushing comments such as “I was gobsmacked!”, or “Okay, the plot has problems, but this guy can really write, eh?”
Apparently hundreds, maybe thousands, of semi-literate viewers race out to buy the titles under discussion, no doubt stacking them uncracked beside the telly. Most publishers, who care only about selling, would kill to get their writers on this show. I gather the same is true of Oprah.
I thought people weren’t doing books any more. What is going on here? Is this a backlash against too many years of guilt for muddling through life slumped in front of the television? Are we finally becoming aware of our abysmal ignorance? Is the limbic brain starting to stir?
Not likely. Book clubs in Britain seem to be mainly a good way to meet girls. In the U.S., there are two types at opposite ends of the spectrum.
First, there are the exclusive clubs in which the self-important will talk your ear off, hoping to conceal an IQ of about 90. These clubs are nothing new. Back in the 1950s, Robert McNamara, the darkman of Camelot, used to drive through blizzards from Detroit to Ann Arbor for book club evenings. He achieved some notoriety as a different kind of businessman by demonstrating that he could read. It was all terribly earnest.
Now the estimable Wall Street Journal has defined the current format in a recent extended feature. A WSJ team established that the nation is generating clubs that are famous for the number of applicants they turn down. This is a familiar refrain in American society: it’s not so much about the reading, it is about being accepted. California Secretary of Education Richard Riordan is the archetypal club leader, deciding what his club members will read and who will be allowed to talk about it. As for trying to join, forget it. Applicants are told “Membership is closed.” Bang. A book club in New York outdoes him. It boasts a waiting list of 200.
The other club format seems more serious. I spoke to a typical organizer, a smart lady from Boston named Julie Wolf Wagner. She and her sister started alone, reading the same book then having lunch to kick it in, out or around. “What we wanted at first was release from our own children,” she said. But they gradually expanded the circle, and now meet once a month with other intelligent women, including a pediatrician and an academic dean.
I asked her what she was trying to accomplish. “We want to recapture some of the college spirit of learning,” she said. “It’s good to read on deadline, using our skills, looking for themes, almost as we would do for an English course.” For atmosphere, a recent discussion of “Brick Lane” was held in an Indian restaurant, the full seven-woman roster in attendance.
No doubt a large part of the reading club trend is similar to the Wolf Wagner variety--,educated young mothers who suddenly find themselves in an intellectual vacuum, and are looking for a way to keep the brain active.
Somewhere in the middle of the U.S. spectrum comes the “Reader’s Circle,” a hybrid of chitchat and litchat. A map of the United States shows where these groups have sprung up (Go to http://www.readerscircle.org/documents/map.bmp). The two coasts are pretty busy but there is a million-square-mile oval stretching from Minnesota to Texas, up though Nevada and around to the Dakotas in which no such groups exist except for a flicker of action in Denver and Boise. Is it a coincidence that all these states are in the red zone politically?
If you want to start your own club and don’t have a clue how to do it, a site at www.bookbrowse.com will steer you around the pitfalls. Pages and pages of advice, dotted with exclamation marks, italics and grammatical howlers, are surely meant to amuse:
-- For your first few books, choose reasonably short books (leave "War and Peace"for a later meeting!).
-- If your club includes an obnoxious know-it-all, consider “gently pointing out what they're doing--they're probably not aware of the effect they're having (and it's probably not just at your book group meetings that they're doing this!).”
Break the ice. Inject some
fun in your discussion. Ask the participants these questions:
-- “Which book have you read most frequently?”
-- “Name one book/author that you really can't stand.”
-- “Which character in a book do you think is most like
you?”
-- “Which character in a book would you most like to be?”
-- “Which literary character would you most like to have
a 'significant relationship' with?”
Maybe it doesn’t matter how hollow the discourse might be
or what the motivation is for buying and holding a book in your
hands. Julie Wolf Wagner, no fan of the Oprah TV show, sees Oprah’s
book efforts as “no bad thing.” If only one in a thousand
book buyers actually gets hooked, that’s progress of sorts.
Meanwhile, authors should relax. At least they will benefit from
the royalties.
©2005 by Michael Johnson.
The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895
Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column
was first posted on March 21, 2005.
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can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Michael Johnson. To send
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