repression. A defense mechanism whereby you place a sticky note on the novel’s cover with a phrase akin to “Read by the 19th.” The novel is then carefully set on the passenger seat of your car where it will surely be read over lunch. It is left there for several days, displaced to the floor by a passenger who asks how it is — this being the last time you acknowledge the novel’s existence aloud — then it is further pushed into the unconscious by a scarf, gloves, newspaper, several fast food bags, and other much more enticing reads.
denial. A defense mechanism predicated on your inability to accept the painful reality that you are supposed to be reading the selected novel that you literally tried to bury. Though you are a victim discriminated against by the very institution you helped found, forced to read a novel you have no interest in, you do not acknowledge this and therefore do not react to stimuli that even tangentially references the aforementioned novel, its characters, themes, motifs, symbols, publisher, genre, style of binding, font, page numbers, etc.
projection. A defense mechanism that occurs when you attribute to someone else your own unacceptable thoughts or feelings. Projection is most commonly manifested by your accosting strangers on the street, yelling, “Read it! You don’t want to be in the book club, asshole!? How about you just stop freaking out and pick up the damn book!”
displacement. A defense mechanism whereby you redirect your emotional responses from their real target to someone else, such as the other members of the book club, while nursing the shiner you received on the street yesterday. Though you maintain that you have no problem with the selected novel, you find you hate everything about your co-members and therefore engage in reckless and hostile social media use. All posts, photos, and tweets highlight their social, physical, and intellectual flaws.
reaction formation. A defense mechanism wherein you convert an unacceptable feeling into its opposite by declaring that you are in fact incredibly thrilled to be forced to read this novel. You begin devouring it with unparalleled alacrity. A painfully rosy outlook as well as caffeine-abuse usually accompany reaction formation, while the other book club members ultimately grow shifty watching your nails dig into the coffee table, actually splintering the wood, as you praise the work of genius that you wish had been 500 pages longer since the 500 pages you had to read was such utterly delightful shit.
rationalization. A defense mechanism in which you offer acceptable reasons for unacceptable behavior since they were all so obviously paranoid and delusional when they ganged up on you like that and so it made complete sense for you to throw your friend’s hardback edition of the novel through the plate glass window resulting in expulsion from your book club, friend circle, and favorite coffee shop.
regression. A defense mechanism wherein you retreat to behavioral patterns of an earlier stage of development by asking some co-workers if they would be interested in starting a book club.
Tags: book club, humor, zane shetler
Sounds like fun. Does Jonathan Franzen have any new books?
Also, I totally relate to the migration of Book from passenger seat to the nether regions of a messy car.
I find book clubs… bizarre. Someone explain them?
I mean, I enjoy discussing books I have read, and that is why I am friends with people who read. But reading is, for me, a mainly solitary pursuit and to have to read a book in a certain amount of time and then talk about it seems a lot like school to me. Except, unlike school, there is not going to be an authority figure to get the class back on track if two or more people decide that our interpretations are not only wrong but mark us out as awful human beings.
I feel like bookclubs are actually 20% talking about/pretending to have read the book and 80% drinking wine.
My mum has a ‘non-bookclub bookclub’ where they don’t read anything, they just go to a restaurant together.
I feel like if you want to hang out as a group and drink wine, you go ahead and do that. No need to make ‘worthy’ excuses for it, like ‘we’re discussing LITERATURE!’
Your points are excellent and so is your Mom!
Book clubs are something that I think I should like because of the demographics (I’m a white lady in her 30s in an urban area), but I just can’t. I love books and I love discussing books with certain people, but the idea of getting together for a “ladies night” for a book club makes me want to hurl. There is not enough wine in the world to get me to attend a book club.
I’m attending my first book club meeting next week (maybe 1/4 through the book? oops.) and there are dudes coming. In fact, it was organized by a dude… So, there are ways around the ladies’ night aspect, at least…
That’s basically how I feel about them as well! I feel like I fit the exact target demographic of book clubs and yet I just recoil at the mere thought. My best friend is in one and she loves it and keeps trying to get me to come with her, and I feel like I’d rather honestly have a standing monthly root canal appointment.
Two reasons I like book clubs:
1. “Seems like school without the authority figure” sounds pretty great to me, actually. I mean, not having to write papers and take tests on things I’m not really interested in reading is obviously a thing I enjoy, but I do sometimes miss the intensive way I read things (in college more so than high school). I tend to be a super-fast reader when it comes to things I really enjoy, and having a chance to articulate my interpretations at a book club forces me to slow down a bit and read more thoughtfully.
2. I’ve never been in a book club that’s just a tight group of friends–they always keep adding someone’s old friend from school or their coworker or their boyfriend’s sister. I’ve found it to be a nice, low-stress way to meet new people and cultivate newish friendships. We all have the book to talk about, which avoids awkward silences and provides a nice jumping-off point for other topics of conversation.
ETA that these reasons really only apply when your book clubs are full of Gracies rather than Alis
Maybe this is a little arrogant of me, but I also think I might want something *else* from a book club? I want to talk about how this book presents cultural elements and what it says about them through the lens of character and setting, and I feel like most people in book clubs… don’t?
Like I will want to talk about the books attitudes to gender and race and sexuality A LOT.
My book club (we’ve only had one meeting… but I am optimistic for the future because the book that won the votes for meeting 2 is all about race in the US/written by an African American man because we agreed not to do white male authors) does that!! I was dreading it and thought it would suck, a bunch of early 20s girls pretending to be grown ups and idk I was basically imagining a yogurt commercial. But everyone was pretty nice and smart and had great thoughts to share – mostly credit for this goes to the friend who organized the group. She hangs with good people/I think she cherry-picked progressive, fun feminists.
You just have to choose your book club carefully. Mine is full of English PhDs and MFAs 🙂 Not that we don’t occasionally let our hair down and do some hardcore identification, but we try to hit a level somewhere between Oprah’s book club and seminar.
The only time I’ve ever achieved this was in an actual library school class led by The Most Holy Nancy Pearl, but really, if you put a pack of grad students anywhere, eventually it’s going to come around to race, sexuality, and colonialism.
If you live in NYC then I have a book club for you that definitely does that (including lots of discussions of the books attitudes to gender and race and sexuality). This may be because it’s all made up of Toasties and ex Hairpinners? But yeah it’s a good group. If you aren’t in NYC I bet starting a Toast book club (or hunting down one of the old hairpin book clubs) for your city would be a good way to get the kind of discussion and good books that you want.
Hey, it’s my book club! Mine was started by some college friends of one of my high school friends, and our whole social web is all tangled and interesting now. I wouldn’t say that the social dynamics are 100% perfect at all times, but we do avoid drama even though our personalities and interests vary. I love that I’ve been able to get to know so many great people, since I have a hard time with that unless there’s something external like a book to focus on.
ALSO we had sweatshirts made with our names on the back.
OK, I’ll bite! I love my book club because:
– I love reading but it’s not always easy to prioritize, and this means that even in a month where I’m mostly not making time for it, I’ll likely read at least one thing.
– I can be picky and judgy and this gets me to read books that I would probably not otherwise pick up; sometimes I don’t like them and sometimes I do, but it gets me to cast a wider net and I think that’s a positive overall thing.
– In the event that some of us don’t finish the book (happens almost every month), no one minds at all.
– Although I am friends with lots of people who read, we all read different things, and discussion doesn’t happen that often organically. And I love the discussion — it reminds me of the parts of college I miss, and forces me to verbalize my thoughts in a way other people can understand, which feels good for my brain.
– Although it’s true that 80% or more of our time is spent drinking wine, eating good food, and talking about other things, which doesn’t require a club structure, I would never have met most of these women in the first place if I hadn’t joined the book club.
I probably have found an exceptionally good book club, but they exist and can be wonderful!
Avoidance: Being always told “you’re a reader, you should join my book club!” and being the master of coming up with all the excuses in the world not to, because you know you are not patient enough to be in a “book club” unless you’re the person in charge who picks all the books and has “get out of here forever” kicking-out rights for anyone that might even hint at 50 Shades.
I’ve never been in a book club because of the distinct feeling that the books were terrible and the attendees were going to be cooing over any sexy parts.
If I were ever to be in a bookclub it would be a ‘no whit man bestseller’ zone and a ‘no 50 shades/twilight/similar’ zone, and they would all be people who actually enjoyed the active, critical reading of books and analysis of text.
So that’d be me and my new friend Maz, really.
Yeah there would just have to be somewhere around 400 rules like that to really narrow the types of books we’d be reading… which would then, clearly, narrow the appeal of the club down to a point where it’d probably just be like “you and your friend happen to be reading the same book! Have some drink!”
I get the feeling that me posting something like ‘can we have a book club, only not at my house, avoiding bestsellers in general and best sellers by white men specifically, concentrated on the works of women and POC, avoiding erotica (because while that stuff is cool I don’t actually want to talk about it in depth), and we will talk about the way this book talks about the cultural status of human beings a lot and I kind of expect you to bea ble to talk about the language in specifics rather just ‘well written” will get VERY FEW responses.
I mean, we’re a ‘city of literature’ but still.
Maybe I should post a request in the local hipstery bookshop.
I think for me I’d want that PLUS “every other month I want to read an academic nonfiction book about the history of oppressed groups and discuss it at a masters seminar level,” which would basically mean I’d have to put my call for book club members out through the history departments of local universities.
I dunno, I’d sign up!
I’d totally join. I have considered joining a book club recently but my googling of book clubs in the area has only returned new agey bullshit book clubs discussing The Secret. I would literally rather eat my own foot than do that.
If you all lived in Norfolk, england, I’d be into it.
My major problem is, of course, my own mental health. I can’t DO the required steps to make these connections, and I jsut don’t connect well with people in person.
You can ignore my previous comment because I just saw that you live in Norfolk! But still, I think based on my current (very positive) experiences with my book club, and how it’s basically exactly what you’re looking for, if you ever have the time and energy I would start a Norfolk Toast group, post it in the friday thread, and go from there.
It does require quite a bit of organizing though (finding a place, ensuring there is enough space, picking the date, picking the book) but you can always reach out to other Norfolk toasties to see if some of them would like to organize it and then you can just attend. Even just a Toast meetup group for your area would be good, because then you can talk about books as well as other stuff.
People keep saying that to me as well, and I recoil in horror. A four-year French literature degree has given me a massive hatred of ever discussing books, it just kills the joy of reading for me to talk about it. It;s like taking a toy apart to see how it works and then I can’t put it back to being a toy afterwards.
Well, I probably wouldn’t have read ‘The Second Sex’ without a bookclub in which to do it, though I’m not sure that I really gained a lot from reading it? That’s mostly on me, though.
The Second Sex might be the one book I would be interested in reading with a club. Note to self: make more friends, form book club with extremely limited mission
I really enjoyed book discussion in classes, both in undergrad and library school, but I have yet to join a real book club. I like dismantling a book with others! I just want to do it with books that aren’t written by white men. SEATTLE TOASTIES LET’S DO THIS. Bring wine.
Totally.
I’ve generally had a visceral horror of book clubs–anyone remember that scene in Little Children when “Kate Winslet the PhD student” goes on some tangent about how Emma Bovary is a feminist and then the suburban moms effectively call her a slut? That’s pretty much how I imagined them, plus, as a (now-former) academic, stabbing myself in the eye seemed more appealing than sitting around talking about RELATING and FEELINGS.
HOWEVER, for the past six or so months I’ve been in a book club with a small group of academic-ish women, reading books by and about women, and it’s a lovely mix of critical discussion and talking about our feelings. Plus, it’s a reason to actually read a whole book every month! Yes, there are total cliche elements to it (getting away from our husbands and kids until the SO LATE hour of 10PM), but it really is about the only time I have these days to get together with women, and I love it.
Moral: there may be a book club out there for you somewhere!
This is kind of what I want… Once #2 pops out, I want an excuse to be out of the house with wine and adults once a month.
Exactly! Somehow it’s easier to get out of the house under the cover of “I have to go talk about this book” than “I badly need a drink and for people to stop touching me.”
Dear everyone in this thread with an avoidance,
I think you are getting way too much of your ideas about book clubs from pop culture, specifically pop culture targeted at middle-age suburban moms (not that there’s anything wrong with MASMs). I am not saying that you have to or that you should join a book club, but I wanted to let you know that the experience does not have to be all books by white men or books about sex or books that are Great Literature. Look how many of you are in this thread griping about not wanting to read/discuss those books! There are plenty of those people out there. Go forth and find them.
Love,
Book clubs are for all types
Well said. Book clubs are what you make them!
Agreed. I’m getting some disconcerting vibes from a lot of the responses. A sort of “I’m not a girl who likes to hang out with girls” vibe. Why does everyone think that no one in a book club (besides herself) would have any desire or capacity for reading something in a thoughtful and critical manner?
FWIW, I don’t know if I could actually get through 50 Shades, but I’ve come across and participated in some really fun discussions of WTH the deal is with the Twilight books. I also watched the Twilight movie as part of a gender & sexuality course in college. If nothing else, there’s always a good discussion to be had about why girls’ popular culture is so universally reviled?
“I’m getting some disconcerting vibes from a lot of the responses. A sort of “I’m not a girl who likes to hang out with girls” vibe. Why does everyone think that no one in a book club (besides herself) would have any desire or capacity for reading something in a thoughtful and critical manner? ”
That’s an interesting assumption. It’s got a great deal less to do with that for me and a great deal more to do with preferring to do my critical reading in my own time not to anyone elses schedule. Also, considering that even in university level classes most of the people I met were not as interested in reading critically in the way I was, perhaps it’s reasonable to think that finding a group that I’d a: get on with and b: be able to have that level of conversation with would be difficult? My friends (nearly all women) like different genres and get different things out of them.
I think you and I have the same reason for not being in a book club! I also am not very interested in keeping to an external schedule (…still in Book 1 of Middlemarch, is that still happening?) and I don’t particularly want to have conversations with anyone about what I’m reading.
Anyway, I think the tone of my original comment was perhaps more critical than I meant it, and I didn’t mean to make any assumptions about fellow Toasties. I, unfortunately, am surrounded (at work! on facebook! family functions!) by women who proudly proclaim that they just hate women, and so I’m possibly a little over-eager to defend more typically-female activities, even if I don’t engage in them. (I hate nail polish but will defend to the death your right to wear it, etc.)
Once a male partner at my firm told me, sighingly, that he wished he could be in a book club, but he was a man.
I was like LOL WUT. Half of the members MY superior bookclub are men! Straight men with beards! We read Murakami and other things. Etc. A big part of bookclub is throwing theme dinners. Often we we don’t all read all of the book.
I’m a hipster and I’m better than other people?
There are some books I read and I’m like, “IS ANYBODY SEEING THIS! A BOOK SOOOO GOOD MUST BE DISCUSSED!”
However, I used to work in a coffee shop where a variety of book clubs would meet, probably a pretty small sample size, but it’s what i have. 1. The books were terrible and 2. Everyone was always cooing over the sexy parts. *sigh* I haven’t found my book club sirens as of yet.
If that was my only experience with book clubs, I’d be running fast, too. I can’t imagine almost any situation where I (personally) would want to discuss sexy parts of a book in public with people that I may or may not know very well.
I promise they’re not all like that.
That’s a relief, hope springs eternal.
There’s a quirky show about an American ex-pat who starts a book club in Glasgow…”The Book Group”. I highly recommend. Hulu maybe?
Guys I have a book club meeting in a week and a half and the book in question (Serena by Ron Rash) has 19 holds on 2 copies at the library and I don’t want to buy it unless someone here tells me that it’s incredibly amazing (I’m not huge on historical fiction in general). Buy it and return it later? Has anyone ever done that for a book club?
My book club is a rotating roster of women who meet in a bar once a month. We tend to read books by contemporary female writers, which we discuss intelligently and thoughtfully for about a half an hour. And then the booze kicks in, the feminist ranting begins, and the remainder of the evening turns into a happy-hour-fueled haze where I get to shoot the shit with smart, literary women and make new friends. I show up to book club with the book half-read… most of the time.
It’s pretty much the best.
I kind of want to join a book club.
I like reading, but I tend to keep myself to a small pool of books and I don’t tend to expand that very often, so I think a book club would be a great way for to stop reading Urban Fantasy/LM Montgomery/Tom Clancy books almost exclusively. (OK, so I haven’t read a ton of Clancy because his PsyOps books were not my thing, but I freaking LOVE The Hunt for Red October.)
I also have very few friends locally, and I think that books are a nice common ground in which to at least maybe meet some new people.
However, I live in suburbia and most of the book clubs I HAVE heard about have honestly been women my mom’s age who are reading either 50 Shades or Christian novels, which are neither my thing, no matter how much expanding I think I need to make.
Oh goodness, a smart, feminist book blub devoted to reading Tom Clancy and drinking wine would be my idea of heaven. Have you read Rainbow Six? I devoured it on vacation in October.
I haven’t, but it’s on my list of Books to Read!!
I have book club tonight and we’re eating tacos and drinking Coronas to stave off the snow. I am unsure what book we were supposed to have read.
I hope it does stave off the snow! I wish it did that all of the time… I would eat tacos and drink beer every day. (not much of a hardship thankfully)
I hope it does stave off the snow! I wish it did that all of the time… I would eat tacos and drink beer every day. (not much of a hardship thankfully)
"I think I'm an antisocial, anti-academia lump o' feels?"
Haha, me too. I like the feel of a book and instead of talking about it coherently (I've tried) I absorb the characters and the story. If anyone asks me for details I'm all, "Mmduhhhh"
Because I work in theatre (director) and have many friends who are actors and therefore we all have minimum wage jobs and are busy not doing the thing we want to do, we have a play reading group where we show up and allocate parts and read the play then and there. It’s great because you don’t have to read it beforehand, just get a copy, and making your way through the mountain of Plays You Should Have Read Because White Male Directors Reference Them All The Time is much easier when you’re two thirds of the way through the gin and, largely, taking the piss.
Recently, however, this has simply started to devolve into Drunk Shakespeare Club, whereby we all show up with a bottle of wine, pull character names out of a hat and, regardless of age or gender appropriate casting, stage our radical (drunk) interpretations of the Complete Works.
If you live in NYC then I have a book club for you that definitely does that (including lots of discussions of the books attitudes to gender and race and sexuality). This may be because it's all made up of Toasties and ex Hairpinners? But yeah it's a good group. If you aren't in NYC I bet starting a Toast book club (or hunting down one of the old hairpin book clubs) for your city would be a good way to get the kind of discussion and good books that you want.