I have a book club, The Very Extra Book Club, and I consider it a big part of my life. Ours is really very extra. We take pains to make it so, which is probably why the pandemic really threw a monkey wrench in our otherwise regular plans.
For one the pandemic made us a little more possessive of our time, and a lot more careful about the things we expose ourselves to, like the vagaries and the tortures often spelled out in books, whether fiction or non-fiction. Post-pandemic, many of us are electing to read books that are light on the soul, safer on our sanity, although, I think, based on our record, we didn’t wince before from books that would get us up close and personal with the harsh possibilities or even realities of life.
Right now, on my own, although it was a fellow Extra, what we call each other in the book club, Jae de Veyra-Pickrell, who recommended it, I am reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkinson, opening myself up to the long history of slavery in the US, about 12 generations, from 1619 to 1865. It’s eyeopening, quite painful, to realize that what happened to the Jews, already too horrific, is just a scratch compared to all the atrocities toward the Blacks in America, if only because the former lasted only from 1933, the year Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, to 1945 while the latter lasted, legal and sanctioned by the state, for 246 years. As the author put it, “No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African- Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaved. That will not come until the year 2111.”
How I wish I were reading it with my book club, especially since I am reading it because of a fellow Extra’s passionate recommendation over whisky on the rocks at 2 a.m. in a speakeasy!
Reading is a solitary activity, but a book club makes it less so.
We are each a co-creator of the book we are reading, which is only as good as the scenarios it inspires us to create in our heads, whether we are reading about the seductions of Humbert Humbert’s nymphet, as he would refer to her, in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita or Truman Capote’s heart wrenching fall from grace in the upper realms of 1970s New York society in Laurence Leamer’s Capote’s Women. When you read with a book club, these scenarios are multiplied by the number of book club members you are reading it with, so you get a lot more from each book in terms of perspective. Plus, with a book club, you are not limited to your personal preferences. Your book club will compel you to read books you otherwise consider beyond your range.
I’d like to endear all writing teachers, literary professors, grammar instructors to encourage their students to form book clubs, especially now that reading is under siege, with social media taking up too much of this generation’s time.
A book club is the best way to promote reading, as well as to form bonds and friendships, as well as to train the mind to be more critical, less impressionable.
In the Very Extra Book Club, composed, other than me and Jae, by Alicia Sy, Belle Daza, Farrah Mae Sy, Marielle Santos Po, Pauline Juan, Rajo Laurel, Rocio Olbes, and Stephanie Zubiri, every conversation over a book is no-holds-barred. It’s quite intense, often revelatory, at our book club dinners, but it’s always exciting, as we dress up according to the fashions in the book we are to discuss, and often even eat as if we were characters in the book. Think vichyssoise, as Truman’s New York swans would have it at La Côte Basque, Lutèce, or La Grenouille, at our Capote’s Women dinner or think peaches for dessert when we sat down to discuss André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name.
come with these guide questions to keep the conversation from
straying from the book
A book club is fun. It’s a self-empowering, mind-broadening, soul-expanding way to spend time with friends.
In case, you are in the mood to get you and a few friends or other people together, here are five guidelines on prepping yourself for a book club, setting one up, and being an interesting, intriguing, provocative member thereof.
1. Open yourself up to experiences, good and bad, fiction and nonfiction, real time and virtual, imagined, invented, borrowed, endured, and enjoyed.
2. Increase your empathy. There is a gamut of human emotions and experiences unavailable to you, unless you learn to walk in the shoes of other beings, real or fictional.
3. Step outside your tight circle of like-minded friends and prepare to subject your opinions and sensibilities to the challenges of an intelligent discourse.
4. Show up, step up, speak up (and in our case, dress up). Like life, literature has no definite answers and much of it, between the lines, along the lines, may be unknowable, but as in life the pursuit of the impossible is a great exercise for the soul. It helps push the limits of your imagination. It helps expand your personal boundaries and make your world a bigger place.
5. Take interest in the human condition. Needless to say, take interest in books, in poetry, in music, in film, in art. All literature as a form of art is an attempt to understand life, whether by embracing or escaping it. Yours is a similar attempt every day and so is everyone else’s.