As we launch the Times Book Club, Alyson Rudd tells how joining a club made reading a different, exciting experience
It was ten years ago and I was a new mum at the local school. My son bounced into the playground and made friends while I stood on the fringes wondering what the parent protocol might be and feeling slightly awkward. Conversations were eventually struck up, coffees drunk and then, after a few months, came an invitation. Would I like to join a book club?
It was like being in an Enid Blyton story; I was being asked to join a secret society. So I was flattered — and then worried. Book clubs presumably read books and I did not do that. Oh, I read my kind of book — the kind where the writer was dead and themes were deep — but I could not possibly read contemporary fiction.
“Do you read books by living authors?” I asked. Instead of retracting the offer the women rubbed their hands together, delighted with the challenge of converting me to modernity. I will admit that I accepted more as a chance to meet other mums than to broaden my literary horizons. I held out little hope of actually enjoying any of the books.
The first novel chosen was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I did not enjoy it. It tried too hard to bring multicultural Britain to life and, while the melting pot that is London is a tempting subject, I did not want to have to fall into it and drown among all its characters; there were far, far too many for me. It explored too many themes and was not as well written as the Gogol I had just finished. But I remember the experience of encountering it through the group vividly; the reading of it, the ensuing discussion, the ripe Brie and grapes we munched while discussing its flaws.
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Our book club choice: One Day by David Nicholls
“It wasn’t quite the right choice was it?” the woman who picked it will say even now.The more polite club members will say it was fine, while I agree it was a disappointment. But it was not a dreadful book, the cheese and wine were more than fine —and my new friends were fun.
So we moved on to the next book and my heart sank: it was Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams. It sounded awful. It would surely be whimsical and soppy and indulgent and quite possibly dull and earnest to boot. One love letter is more than enough for me, I thought.
“Are you sure?” I asked, “I would never pick up something with a title like that.” I dutifully read it, though — and that was when I became a true, even zealous, book club fan. Four Letters is remarkable; a moving and quietly beautiful novel and one I would never have read without my book club. The other members did not have to gloat, for I freely admitted my folly.
In some respects a book club sounds counterintuitive. Reading is a solitary pursuit, an opportunity to shut out the world of work or the drone of the television. For years I would, after devouring a great novel, feel low upon finishing it. It was worse than the end of a holiday. I had been part of a whole new world, a separate society, an individual’s trials and tribulations, murder and redemption or love and hate and then, with the turn of a final page, it was gone.
Book clubs are a cure for that sudden onset of depression. Instead of feeling lost upon finishing a captivating novel, you feel a buzz of anticipation. What did the rest of the gang make of it? You do not have to foist the book you have just enjoyed upon someone and have to wait for them to decide to read it. With a book club you know a group of people are reading it at the same time as you. They drop hints. The book is getting stodgy or it has picked up after a slow start or have you got to the part where the priest . . ? No, I won’t spoil it.
The gathering represents closure and a pain-free way to start another book. Instead of saying to no one in particular, with a deep sigh, “Ah, that was so moving” and being looked at as if you are either slightly simple or overly bookish, you can say it and receive a knowing nod or an informed shake of the head.
A book club can help to sort out the niggling little details that never quite made sense. Did the boy see the murder or imagine he had seen it? Together you assemble the clues and even if you conclude that the author was deliberately obtuse and we are not supposed to reach an answer at least you can share the frustration and thereby neutralise it.
The rise of the book club has transformed the way we feel about reading. Where there were geeks there are now trend setters. Books are cool. Books are common currency. “What team do you support?” and “What are you reading right now?” are interchangeable in the realm of casual conversation. It is more interesting to discover if someone has read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road rather than seen the film. No harm at all in consuming both, of course, and many book clubs will watch together the film version of a book and then decide which was best. It is not always the book that wins, either: Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement and the film made of it being a case in point.
Book clubs were spreading like a virus before Oprah and Richard & Judy launched their own television versions. Both were hugely successful because they did what all good book clubs should do. They pushed their audiences. Oprah asked a nation to read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez — and no one batted an eye. Richard & Judy’s readers took on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Books were chosen, not because they were safe bets, but because they would be loved.
It is ultimately all about shared experience. Why, given that we can replay practically every TV show that we like, do most of us prefer to watch EastEnders and Britain’s Got Talent when they are first screened? It is because we want to join in the chat about them afterwards at work or school. It is so much more fun if you know millions of other people are gasping or giggling at the same moment that you are. The same is true of books.
It is less painful to read a flawed novel if you are not alone and more pleasurable to devour a superb one if you know you can share your thoughts almost immediately. A good book will always make you feel special, as if the author had you in mind. It will always transport you away from your sofa or deckchair to Victorian Clerkenwell or outer space. When you land back in your chair, though, it is rather nice to be able to talk about the journey with someone who has been there too.
About The Times Book Club
Each week a different Times writer will deliver their verdict on the title under discussion. We start it all off with One Day by David Nicholls, and in four weeks I will introduce a new book — and then three more Times writers will praise or heckle in response. The books will be very different, but all will prompt a hearty chat.
Not all books do. How many times has someone said of a novel: “It was quite good, not bad”? It hardly makes you want to dive in yourself.
One Day is a perfect choice for a book club because it prompts a need in the reader to share the experience. It is not a book you snap shut with a satisfied sigh and move on. Whether you are moved, angered or baffled you simply must find out what others thought about it.
But I loved it well before I reached the end. And that itself is a good question for any club. Do you have to finish a book before you call it superb? The answer is probably yes, you do, but One Day is so well constructed it deserves to be the exception to the rule.
Once One Day has been dissected, Times writers will turn their attention to Mountains of the Mind, in which Robert Macfarlane explains the pull of the peaks and why climbers are prepared to die for a decent view across a glacier. And then it will be time for a classic with Burmese Days, by George Orwell.