There is a book club of my wildest dreams. There are around 12 of us, the perfect number if you want to strike a festive tone without conceding that sense of intimacy. None of us dares skip the reading, and nobody bails on the meeting. We adore each other to bits, and after our scintillating literary discussion, we stick around and get buzzed on gossip. After we go home, our society immediately implodes, like one of those insects that dies right after mating.
In real life, I have been a diligent member of five book clubs, which means that I have been through four awkward breakups—and that doesn’t even count the book-club invitations I inelegantly turned down at the outset. Like so many of life’s pleasures, book clubs can be dangerous for those of us with issues around impulse control. They always sound so low-key and fun, a pajama party for the thinking woman!
And then your first meeting is fast approaching, and you realize you have to read a whole book to justify your presence. And sometimes it’s not the book you’d choose, but here you are doing your chores while listening to an audiobook at 2.2 speed of a Pulitzer-winning epic about the plight of pig ranchers. You’re only halfway through when you realize that this is a task that you will never complete. Because there will be a next title and a next one after that.
Tried as I have to be an upstanding book-club citizen, I’m not always equal to the struggle. I’ve shown up late. I’ve ghosted. I’ve dominated the conversation. I’ve sat too close to the baked brie wheel. (My first book club was in Canada, where you’re not allowed to host a book club without a disk of baked brie.) I’ve baked a whole fish only to be stood up en masse, and I’ve dealt with it by sending a histrionic message about my resignation, effective immediately.
Book club number five, my current group, was worth all this Goldilocks-ing around. One of the myriad things I love about my book club is that nobody resigns, or if they do, I’m none the wiser. (And yes, I’m aware that this contradicts one of my rules below, but it works.) We’re connected by a massive WhatsApp group, which functions as a nerve center for 50 or so like-minded women. (The volume also means that the select 15 or so who attend each time varies.) We talk about books but also connect over media gossip, spare concert tickets, thoughts on laser peels, you name it—our group chat is the richest text of them all.
Below are some considerations to bear in mind as you dream up your own club.
Book-Club Rule Number One: Offer Your Middle Name Only
The first rule of book club is that nobody will agree to be named in an article about her book club. Unless she can go by her middle name.
Book-Club Rule Number Two: Appoint a Book Club Editor in Chief
I’m all for democracy, but there’s still a place for arbiters of taste. If there’s somebody in your book club whose picks you’d be fine with most of the time, entrust them with setting the syllabus. A consensus can result in a title that nobody is crazy about. “There was no structure when it came to picking the next book,” says Anne (middle name), an academic in Toronto who accepted the invitation from a friend who had gone through a traumatic breakup. “It was her way to build a support group. We’d be so tired at the end of every meeting, and the books we settled on for the next one were so random, but everyone just wanted to go home. And we’d end up feeling an obligation to read another novel about farmers in Maine and then discuss it for two hours.”
Book-Club Rule Number Three: Don’t Join a Book Club Just Because You Think You Have To
Being in these societies takes a lot of time. And if you’re doing it for “networking,” the other people in the room probably won’t be that impressed by the person who never does the reading. Try a run club or mahjong class instead.
Book-Club Rule Number Four: Don’t Ask People to Pay to Join Your Book Club
Just don’t. And don’t ask if this was inspired by recent events.
Book-Club Rule Number Five: Your Book Club is Only as Pleasant as Its Most Annoying Member
Adams, 52, works in luxury manufacturing and joined her alma mater’s book club. “I liked it because it was multigenerational,” she says. But there was one bad egg, whose presence became all the more disruptive when the group shifted to Zoom during the pandemic. “She never put herself on mute, she cut everybody off, and she rarely even read the book,” says Adams, who tried jumping in to encourage the members who’d been interrupted to speak up. Finally, she told the group she would be spending her Tuesday nights at an art class instead. “The woman wrote to me and asked if it was because of her. The whole thing really left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Book-Club Rule Number Six: Be Honest With Yourself
When you start thinking about breaking up with your book club, there’s probably a reason. The longer you wait, the harder it gets. Jane, a writer and former book scout living in Europe, had recently moved cities, and an acquaintance asked if she would like to join her book club. “I’d been in a book club when I’d lived in New York, and that chat was so gossipy and delicious,” she recalled. Jane’s new club was much less fun, though, and the books were on the dull side. One night Jane forgot about a book-club meeting and went out, posting pictures on Instagram. The two people who’d shown up sent her texts that made no secret of the offense she’d caused. “I felt sheepish, but I also felt bad because I’d legitimately forgotten, which was so Freudian.” By the time Jane finally mustered the courage to break up with her group, another member had beaten her to the punch, and she found herself feeling all the more stuck.
Book-Club Rule Number Seven: Quit With Clarity
Leaning out and hoping your book club will magically go away can leave room for confusion and continued sore feelings whenever you run into a member of the group you’re not feeling. Feel free to copy and paste this text that Jane’s friend sent to all the members of her book club: