A different kind of book club

Two models and one piece of advice

selections from our hardcover book club

I haven’t belonged to what you would typically call a book club in a very long time. The last one I can recall was in Denver around 1998, when a group of women I knew through a college classmate would gather at Stella’s coffee shop and sit on the patio to talk about books—and lots of other stuff. I don’t recall whether the book club fell apart or I just stopped going, but suffice it to say that was an entire lifetime ago.

The timing of the end of the Stella’s book club (at least for me) coincides with the year I started teaching English at a high school in the Denver suburbs. Essentially, I was already running a book club meeting several times a day, five days a week. Think about it: the traditional American book club runs on the model of high school and college English classes. Usually, there’s not a teacher at book club—though sometimes the group will hire a facilitator or have a member run the meetings. But the discussion itself is a lot like English class, for better or worse. Unlike most English classes, book clubs tend to come to consensus on what to read next, but book club reads can still feel like assignments—books you wouldn’t necessarily choose to read on your own.

Now that I’m no longer teaching and my kids are grown, I could, theoretically, join a new book club. Instead, over the past three years I’ve been involved in two “book clubs” that look quite different from the traditional model, and they work much better for me. They were easy to create, and I never feel like I’m reading something I don’t want to read. And they don’t monopolize all of my reading time. So, I thought I would share these two models with you.

The Hardcover Book Club. Hardcover books are expensive, about $30 a pop these days. For those of us who really prefer to read in print but can’t afford to buy one hardcover after another, there’s a consequence: we’re always behind the curve. We’re sitting on a library waitlist or waiting a full year (or more!) for the interesting book everyone is talking about to come out in paperback. Worse yet, quieter books that don’t get nominated for a big prize may never make it to paperback. They just disappear into the deep strata of the remainders bin.

I don’t need to read every prize nominee, but I do like to read a few books every year that are newish. The friend who brainstormed this model with me feels the same. We’re both writers, so it’s somewhat important for us to be up on what’s getting published. Together, we devised what I’ll call our hardcover book club—because we never bothered to come up with another name for it.

Our hardcover book club was designed to address not only the first aim—reading what’s new—but also to maximize our familiarity with new books. Also, we wanted to have time to read other things. We tried this a few times first with a membership of just the two of us, then recently each invited in one friend to see what would happen if the group grew to four. When book groups get too big (a different number for different cases), they can lose their momentum, so we’re going to sit at four for awhile.

Here's how our hardcover book club works: Once a season, we each choose one book that is only available in hardcover. We let the others know what we’ve chosen so we don’t accidentally overlap. It could be fiction, non-fiction, poetry—whatever we want to read. We pick a date to get together on Zoom (though someday we might meet in person), and in that gathering, we each give a spoiler-free assessment of the book we read. We talk about the premise, how well executed the book is, any problems we found, what we loved about it, and ultimately whether we would recommend it to the others. Then we offer up our copy to be loaned out to whichever other member would like to borrow it to read. (For this reason, the group has to stay relatively local.) This means we’re each spending the cash to buy four hardcover books in a year—an amount that felt manageable to each of us—but we’re gaining the benefit of at least knowing something about three more each season, and the opportunity to read them in print without buying them or waiting in the library queue. We’re coming up on our fifth read now.

The Intermittent Book Club. During the first winter of the pandemic, I decided it was time for a big reading project, one I would never undertake on my own. I talked my husband into reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest with me. Then, just for kicks, we invited some friends to join us. Two of them took us up on it. With only four people, we were able to keep it pretty casual. We didn’t even make a schedule. We just started reading this postmodern tome that weighs in at over 1,000 pages, and at some point one of us would send an email to the other three stating what page we were on and making some observations. Others would jump in when they reached the same point. We had a fun thread going throughout the process of reading, which took more than four months. During that long winter, my husband and I also started making videos for my YouTube channel every 100 pages, talking about how the reading was going, what we were thinking, and where we thought things might be headed. At the end, we all got on a Zoom call and enjoyed talking about the book as a whole.

With many months inbetween, we did other group reads with variations on the same group of friends. We read the classic novel Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray and the more contemporary novel The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. I have a translation of 1,001 Arabian Nights that I’d like to convene some ragtag group to take on next. I suppose my current David Copperfield/Demon Copperhead challenge also falls into this category, even though my friend Susan is the only one reading this pair of books alongside me (though we may have inspired a couple of other readers along the way). We finished David Copperfield just a few days ago.

I probably wouldn’t have read most of these books on my own. I’m not afraid of a long novel or a challenging novel, but there are more novels to read than there is time, and without a friend to read a big, challenging book in tandem with me, it’s just not as much fun—for me, at least—to work my way through the project. To be honest, it feels kind of lonely.

The beauty of the intermittent book club is that no one ever reads something they feel pressured to read because other people expect them to, and it’s easy to take as long a break as you want between books. The whole thing is ad hoc, easy in and easy out. For me, the biggest impediment to joining a traditional book club is the relentless monthly march through books that aren’t necessarily at the top of my personal TBR pile. The intermittent book club avoids all of that.

One thing both of my offbeat “book club” models share is a desire to read less often than once a month with a group of friends, but I know that monthly book clubs provide a stable, beloved gathering place for many. Nevertheless, maybe one of these two book club models will work for you—with or without variations. Maybe they’ll inspire you to dream up the kind of book club you’d really like to belong to. Either way, here’s my final word of advice: a book club is whatever you make of it. All you need is one other person to read with you.

What other kinds of “book clubs” have you belonged to? Let us know in the comments section below!