The Importance of Book Clubs for Writers: Hanging Out in, and With, Books
Reading is often an independent practice—but book clubs offer a chance to share the experience and learn something along the way. Here, author Sheila Liming discusses the importance of book clubs for writers.
I joined the first book club I ever joined because I was starving for intellectual and creative nourishment.
I was 22 years old, a recent college graduate, and living alone in rural Ohio, where I was working my first job. And though I’d understood the practicalities of what college graduation meant—real-world responsibilities, along with real-world bills and the hustle required to pay them—I hadn’t fully considered how spaces would open up in my life when it ceased to revolve around daily discussions of books.
At first, I had tried to subsist on monologues, or conversations with myself, about books. In my shabby attic apartment, I unloaded box after box of them. I lined the edges of the shag-carpeted living room with them, and even turned four stacks of roughly equal size into a coffee table of sorts, with a plate of glass balanced on top of each “leg.” Alone there at the end of each day—save for the many, many mice who shared the place with me—I read. The apartment had come with a television set, a castoff from my landlady who lived one floor below, but I kept it unplugged in a closet. I was, I told myself, on my way to becoming a writer, and that meant I had to read.
But reading by myself, I soon discovered, was only getting me so far. I lacked outlets and audiences for the ideas that bubbled up inside me as I read. So, I joined the book club in question.
It was hosted by the local public library there in Wayne County. The club’s theme for the year was “Ohio Authors,” and that, in practice, meant a lot of Toni Morrison novels, which suited me just fine. We met once a month in a windowless basement room, beneath tinted neon lights that made everyone look like they were drowning in pondwater. The conversations were often frustrating—this was rural Ohio, after all, and the majority of book club participants were retirees who weren’t afraid to brandish their conservative politics. But they were also energizing.
Through the book club, I was drawn into the work of sharpening my own opinions about the books we read. This was different from college, where I’d enjoyed the lethargy that comes from commonly held opinion. Most of my classmates’ views had existed on a spectrum on which I could also locate my own. If we didn’t agree, exactly, we had sensed that the distances between our separate views were not all that vast.
But there in the basement of the Wayne County Library, those metaphorical spaces proved to be bigger and more intimidating. I did not always enjoy our book club meetings (I recall watching two fiery septuagenarians almost come to blows over the subject of infanticide in Beloved), but I cannot deny that I grew from them and from the challenges they posed to my thinking.
Book clubs serve as a primary means of hanging out with, and through, books. Their history among English-speaking and -reading populations is a long one, stretching back to the 1600s, according to some sources. In reflecting on that history, I’m often reminded of a well-known short story by Edith Wharton.
Written in 1911, “Xingu” features a book club made up of wealthy, aristocratic women who convene in the presence of a celebrated novelist. As one of the club’s members tells their guest of honor, “The object of our little club … is to concentrate the highest tendencies of [our town]—to centralize and focus its intellectual effort.” But Wharton soon reveals that, contrary to these comments, the club’s chief pursuits involve gossip and social gatekeeping.
The story in “Xingu” revolves around an act of sabotage. One of the group’s members, sensing that she is about to be excised from the club for causing “a great outrage” (she has dared to ask one of the group’s leaders about her opinions on a certain book), induces the group to discuss a topic they clearly have no understanding of. They all play along, rhapsodizing pseudo-intellectually on the subject of “Xingu,” which they variously identify as a philosophy, a brand of psychology, even a set of ancient texts. At the end of the story, they are left with the humiliating revelation of their hubris: “Xingu” is the name of a river.
I have attended book groups that bore some resemblance to the one Wharton describes in “Xingu,” where certain participants felt driven to perform their intellectualism and bad behavior resulted. But not often. Most of the ones I’ve known—like the one that met in the basement of the Wayne County Library all those years ago—have been much humbler.
In North Dakota, for instance, I was part of a book group that read the works of the French philosopher Giles Deleuze. We met at what is, by most local estimations, the worst bar in the city of Grand Forks—a place called The Bun, which is located across the street from the state grain mill and tucked into the shadow its towering silos. It only serves beer (no wine, no mixed drinks), only from bottles and cans (no taps), and only takes cash. It made for an incongruous setting for our discussion of Deleuze’s text Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, in which the author—in his characteristic and thoroughly complicated way—examines the work of the Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, better known as the M behind the acronym S&M.
IndieBound | Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]
Our group chose The Bun because it was convenient, being located close to my house, and also because it was among the only ones in town to be found open at 2:00 on a Tuesday afternoon. It was also big and rowdy enough, we hoped, to mask much of our conversation, which proved to be the case. The noise from the millworker crowd threw a protective camouflage about our conversations of “the masochistic contract,” as Deleuze calls it.
That book group was intentional, but hanging out in the presence of books doesn’t have to be. Within my own family, for instance, I’ve participated in many an ad hoc book group: There was the summer, for instance, when my partner and I, along with my mother, father, sister, brother-in-law, and a couple of honorary uncles, all became obsessed with the novels of the American author Tom Drury and proceeded to read, discuss, and swap copies of his books through the mail.
To this day, I maintain the habit of picking up battered copies of Drury novels whenever I happen to discover them in a used book bin, which are then dispatched to colleagues or friends in the hopes of winning more converts to our little group. I recently sent one to a friend back in North Dakota, a wheat farmer who, I thought, might recognize bits of our little prairie community in Drury’s loveable miscreant characters.
Reading might occur alone, in isolation, but it’s built on the idea of social connection. That’s what school taught me first, and book clubs taught me second, and the long horizon of adult sociality taught me last and finally.
Sheila Liming is an associate professor at Champlain College (Burlington, VT), where she teaches classes on literature, media, and writing. She is the author of two books, What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020) and Office (Bloomsbury, 2020), and the editor of one, a new edition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2022). Her essays have appeared in venues like The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and The Point.
