The case against book clubs

Picture the scene: it’s 8 p.m. on a Tuesday. You’re sitting on the sofa in the home of someone you barely know, gulping supermarket wine, making inane chitchat with friends of friends as you all put off the inevitable: discussing a book only a third of the women – always women – in the room have actually bothered to read.

In your head, you’re counting the minutes until you can excuse yourself for the last train home, wondering what’s happening on tonight’s Bake Off and engineering a strategy to quietly remove yourself from the group WhatsApp without appearing rude. You stifle a yawn and subtly check your watch while necking yet more wine.

Sound familiar? Welcome to book club. If you're a woman aged around 25 to 65 you will probably know the set-up only too well: a monthly gathering of supposedly like-minded bookworms who meet at alternating members’ homes to discuss a chosen book, usually over some food and copious amounts of booze.

Almost 5,000 book clubs up and down the country are registered with Reading Agency, the national charity to promote reading. During and immediately after lockdown there was a boom in membership as virtual versions took off. A trend for celebrity book clubs has raised their profile further still: actress Reese Witherspoon has two million members in her virtual reading circle, while other high-profile hosts include Oprah Winfrey, Emma Watson and Cindy Crawford’s model daughter Kaia Gerber.

As an avid reader, I am slap-bang in the target market for book club membership. I founded one myself back in 2011 and joined another in 2020. Having moved to the countryside a little over a year ago, I’m surrounded by literature-loving retirees and quaint village bookshops – which means now should be the perfect time to find a new club, make some new friends and discover some new books. But I have a confession to make: I hate – nay, loathe – book clubs.

Let me explain why. First, there’s the challenge of getting into one. Community groups should, in my opinion, be inclusive gatherings, open to all, no matter your age or experience. But book clubs are nothing of the sort. Gaining access is like getting an invitation to the Met Gala: you have to prove your worthiness to the book club bigwig (usually the founder) before they’ll deign to include you in their hallowed meet-ups.

There are, of course, practical reasons for keeping numbers down: amass too many members and the group simply won’t work. The pros say the optimum number is ten or fewer – anything more and discussions become too unwieldy. This, I think, is the reason my own attempt at starting a book club failed: I allowed anyone and everyone to join, meaning we never knew who was turning up and never reached consensus on what book to read, and eventually the whole thing fizzled out.

I have also been on the receiving end of book club betrayal. I realised a group of my closest female friends were meeting in London once a month without inviting me – simply because I wasn’t part of the club. When I confronted them about it, they said they thought I was too busy to join – and when the coveted invitation came, I felt embarrassed for having begged for it. I remember slinking along, humiliated, to my first meet-up, where I barely spoke a word.

The make-up of book clubs is another bone of contention. According to Reading Agency, 90 per cent of face-to-face groups are female-only. While I’m all for championing women’s interests, I know of few other clubs that are quite so gender-specific – or coven-like – in their membership. When I hosted fellow readers at home many years ago, my husband was banished upstairs for the evening – which, looking back, seems unfair and bizarrely archaic.

Tracing the history of book clubs back to the earliest reported gathering suggests it has always been thus. In 1634, an American named Anne Hutchinson organised a female-only group to examine weekly sermons on board a ship en route to Massachusetts. By the 1800s, women were gathering to discuss Shakespeare texts, and in 1896 journalist Jane Cunningham Croly formed Sorosis, a women’s group for book discussions, lectures and general scholarly debate, which survived in various forms right up until 2016.

As my group trundled on, things took a turn for the worse: husbands, partners and housemates of the book club members began meeting up, separately, on the nights we were gathering. Their tales of cinema outings, pub trips and fun-filled dinners sounded far more entertaining than our rather dry, faux-intelligent attempts to dissect characters, themes and plot, like a rambling English literature class we were compelled to endure in our spare time.

My ire is also directed at the books themselves. As a working parent of two young children, I barely have time to read the books I want to – let alone waste my time wading through those I have little desire to pick up in the first place. In the past, I’ve been forced to read science fiction (my least favourite genre), chick lit (a close second) and dull historical novels (don’t even get me started), all chosen by someone else and imposed on the rest of the group. While some book clubs operate on a more democratic basis, mine haven’t been so: the rest of us didn’t get a say until it was our turn to host the meet-up.

On the night itself, there’s always someone who hasn’t bothered to read the book. Worse still, in the book clubs I’ve been in, some members decided they were so short on time they’d listen to the audio version rather than reading at all, completely defeating the point. Sometimes the discussions would descend into shouty point-making, with everyone trying to outdo one another in their knowledge of symbolism, allegories and hyperbole. Sometimes we’d sit in deafening, awkward silence, until the wine was finished and we could all go home.

You may notice the recurrence of wine in my book club memories. This was, without doubt, the best – and, at times, the only enjoyable – part. I am sure there will be many who disagree, for whom book clubs are a pleasant and stimulating part of their social life. But not mine. I have learned that, for me, books are a solitary – not a sociable – interest, best devoured curled up in a cosy corner, shut away from the rest of the world. So hold your invitations, please: I prefer to read alone.