Hey, friends! I’m writing about book club today—something I’m new to—I’d love to know if you’re in one and if it’s anything like mine. Let me know in the comments!
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I recently had the opportunity to join an exclusive book club. It’s pretty new, and not too many people know about it. As a matter of fact, it only has two members: one of them being me, and the other, my mom.
And while it might be more accurate to say that the two of us both read a book and then talked about it once, that doesn’t sound nearly as cool as how I framed it above.
We have one book under our belts so far, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, and we’ve already selected our second, The Paris Library by Janet Skelsien Charles.
Before going any further, I should clarify one point: neither of us has ever previously been a member of a book club, so aside from reading and then gathering to discuss it, we really didn’t know what the hell we were supposed to do at said book club.
We knew wine generally played an important role, so we were sure to have that on hand, and we decided we should probably pick the next book before leaving, but everything in between popping the cork and that was kind of a question mark. Since we were the only members, though, we didn’t worry too much about our meeting’s structure or lack thereof.
If we were to have created an agenda for the way our meeting actually turned out, it would have looked something like the bulleted list below:
Wine
Share general impressions of the book and rate it out of 5
Wine
Discuss the main characters
Wine
Get sidetracked and discuss family drama
Wine
Examine the plot and themes from the book
Wine
Wine
More gossip about family, friends, family friends, and friends of the family
Dad crashes the party
More wine
I lectured my parents about their finances and how they should spend money more freely
Wine is empty
End of book club
Okay, we didn’t drink that much wine, but our conversation did wander all over the place, often without even a shred of a connection to the book, but you know what? It was a blast!
I highly recommend book club—especially if you’re in the throes of parenthood and find it hard to socialize with the important people in your life. It was nice to gather with a concrete purpose, and it is fun to have something to look forward to.
Finding books that my nearly 70-year-old mother and I would both enjoy reading has also served as a forcing function, leading me to discover books I’d almost certainly not have read otherwise and offering unexpected bits of creative inspiration.
I can’t take credit for the idea of a mother/son book club. I stole it from Nathaniel Roy who in turn stole it from Will Schwalbe. Roy wrote about the concept in a piece linked below when his mother received a breast cancer diagnosis in July of 2022 (happy spoiler: his book club is still going strong nearly four years later).
While I’m almost certain the discussions at their meetings are more literary than ours, I’m pretty sure they’d agree that’s not really the point.
I often write about creativity in terms of making and productivity, but the topic is equally relevant in terms of consumption habits.
It’s easy to default to scrolling on your phone. There’s literally endless content to consume, and it’s not uncommon to discover that hours have seemingly disappeared once you start. Billions of dollars worth of research and split testing have gone into hijacking our attention to keep us “on platform,” after all. Rarely have I ever finished a doomscrolling session, though, with a feeling of accomplishment.
Book club is exactly the opposite.
Book club requires planning, coordination, and meeting in person. It takes time that you have to budget for. There are deadlines, and you’re accountable to others (or in my case, one other). Reading takes work, and thinking about it requires effort, which is perhaps why it feels so rewarding and energizing rather than draining.
If you’ve fallen into a creative rut, the answer may have nothing to do with your creative outputs. You may need to examine your creative inputs.
One of my goals is to foster a greater sense of community with this newsletter. As such, I’d love to know what creative things you are up to and to feature them here.
Drop me a line via email or in the comments below to let me know what you have cooking. Can’t wait to hear about it.
Until next time,
—Mike
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