The Reading Group Handbook

Can you tell I'm catching up on my reviews?

I got this book through Paperbackswap.com and I probably wouldn't own it if it wasn't practically free. Nonfiction and how-to's tend to be suitable for library check-out rather than purchase, unless the subject is something crafty that I expect to refer to during a project or a series of projects.

This book contains a whole lot of obvious information. For example, on the question of what makes a good book group member: Someone who is interested, willing, enthusiastic. Someone who can read at a certain level. Someone who will read. Someone who is committed, prompt, curious, sensitive, inquisitive, and flexible, and who has a good sense of humor. Someone who is both a good listener and a good speaker. Someone who is intelligent. Someone who can stay focused. (In other words, someone who is qualified to be your new best friend.)

Fortunately, this book also takes the inquiry beyond the things that make you go "Duh." For example, should you choose your friends to be in the book group? Are you willing to include strangers, with whom you'll necessarily be sharing your personal contact information? Do you want a homogeneous group, or a purposely more diverse group? If a member isn't working out, will you try to exclude them from the group? If so, what process will you follow to decide to exclude them? Food or no food? Rotating leadership, or a paid facilitator to lead the discussion? How will you choose what to read?

It also contains a wealth of useful reference material: Reading lists, sample syllabi, sources of reviews and other background information, a glossary of literary terms, and advice from group members.

If you are a seat-of-the-pants, everything-will-be-fine type, you may not need to do that much thinking up front about the What Ifs. But if you are a careful planner, or someone who likes to consider all the options in advance, this quick read is worth a look. Ditto if you want inspiration for why to start or join a group in the first place.

Excerpt:

I believe a good book is a gift to be appreciated by the mind, the body, and the soul. It is ours to explore with the excitement of a child, the clarity of a scientist, the spirit of a priest or priestess, and the intensity of a creator. To be able to enhance these pleasures in the company of others is better than a gift--it is a treasure.

Guess What, I've Been Having a Life

So this is how the non-bloggy half lives.

I have been thinking a bit lately about whether I'm becoming addicted to the computer and to blogging in particular, both reading and posting. I don't think it's a problem, except the other day I failed to get to the post office before closing time because I was on-line, and isn't that one of the warning signs? When it starts interfering with your life? That's not a hobby, that's an obsession.

Anyway, lately I've been doing some actual activities, instead of just reading about them, and not for the purpose of blogging about them afterwards (even though I'm doing that now--the motivation is different).

For example, two baseball games in two days! A local college is hosting a tournament, which means multiple games per day for 10 days. Sunday was a day game, yesterday was a night game, and it was so lovely to be outdoors in the nice weather, listening to the ping of the bats (college teams use metal bats, which I loathe) and the noise of the crowd. C.S. was at his own ballgames in Toronto and we kept each other posted via text and cellphone.

Another example: I went to book group last week and it was a hoot, as usual. I talked a friend into joining and this was her first meeting. She told me later she felt like she had been dropped into a play, because all the other members are such character types. I hadn't thought of it that way, but it's true. We have the reserved, erudite Englishman. We have the gruff, opinionated Archie Bunker sort. We have the mousy, soft-spoken librarian and the loud, theatrical Mae West type, and so on.

"Archie" was the leader this time and insisted that we spend the entire first hour simply reading various long passages from the work out loud, in sequence, without any discussion permitted until the second hour. He actually put us on a timer!

We all chafed under this restriction (as you might imagine!), but no one wanted to be a big enough jerk to say, "Forget this stuff, I'm not doing it!" After all, we take turns as the leader and he deserved his chance to lead in the way he wanted . . . even if we hated every moment. Hey, we're opinionated, but we're polite, too.

We read a selection from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, all about the theory, purposes and methods of the penal system, and an hour of discussion was not nearly long enough to cover everything. We probably could have spent the whole hour on whether punishment directed at the body (execution as spectacle, drawing and quartering, hot lead, etc.) is a more or less frightening or inhumane an exercise of government power than the "mind control" practiced by punishments aimed at reforming the character of the criminal. I'm not in favor of torture, but when you start talking about the government practicing character reform you risk getting into George Orwell, Big Brother, 1984 territory. Good stuff for discussion!

So you can see we didn't have enough time, plus there was the added stress of having to squelch the very thing that makes book group wonderful: the animated discussion of the passages by smart people who have different perspectives.

Next time "Archie" leads I will be "voting with my feet" and doing something else that night. If there's no baseball available, maybe I'll stay home and blog.

Zipped Lips Preserve Bookclubs

I'm the newest member, this was my third meeting, and I am still meeting members who weren't there before. The first meeting was such a stimulating experience, I worried afterwards that maybe I had talked too much in my rush of enthusiasm for "lit talk" with very smart, very insightful readers.

I certainly didn't mean to dominate the conversation. But I made a mental note to remember my classroom mantra: "Don't be a gunner,* no matter how much you enjoy the material." The corollary to this is "Don't drink too much coffee before class."

Last meeting I met a member who hadn't attended the first meeting. This person has quite a "big" personality. But I figured that, as the leader of that meeting, she was doing her bit to keep the discussion lively.

This past meeting she was not the leader, but did a lot of the talking anyway. I thought this dampened the contributions of other members who are not so outgoing. Often her insights were helpful, but after she launched her opinion one too many times for my taste, I was tempted to say "And I think it's dangerous to project one's own views of male-female relationships onto characters in literature and then present them as gospel." **

But I didn't say that. I also remembered that someone famous--or at least someone very wise--pointed out that the things we dislike most in others are often the things we dislike most in ourselves.

Food for thought, that.

*In law school, gunners are those eager beaver, goody-two-shoes types who raise their hand to answer every question. If you are interested, I will write a post in defense of gunners, who actually serve a valuable classroom function. Let me know!

**We read Grace Paley's short story "An Interest in Life," for anyone who must know. Good stuff: a very funny and insightful character study.

How was Book Group?

Good question! This time we read Simone de Beauvoir's Introduction to The Second Sex. Not easy material if you aren't tuned up on your philosophy (that would be me and, apparently, most of the rest of the group). We struggled a bit with the concept that she was using logic and personal experience to make generalizations about men and women, instead of basing her assertions on a "scientific study" cited in a footnote at every turn. We also managed to talk about existentialism, sexism, roles, liberty, deference, political power, and "what women want" without anyone losing his or her temper. The tone of the discussion was set right from the beginning. We warmed up by dissecting rather forcefully Beauvoir's most-quoted statement, "One is not born, but becomes a woman."

Yes, we negotiated a veritable minefield. The groundwork was laid when, instead of grouping around in a casual mix of men/women like last time, we managed to sit down without any plan or prearrangement: men on one side, women on the other. No co-ed seating arrangements for us! We had a good laugh when someone pointed that out.

If you have read Beauvoir, who has been called "the twentieth century's preeminent feminist writer and a leading figure in French existentialist thought" (read more about her here), you will also enjoy and perhaps despair at hearing that during the week I mentioned to several people (male and female) that I was reading her excerpt for Book Group. They all responded with some variation of "Wasn't she Sartre's girlfriend?" Oh, the irony of that remark! The more things change . . . .

Today's Word is Pullulation

I like it when I have to look a word up. I also like it when I meet people who do that. It means, among other things, that we are reading challenging books that include words we don't know. It also means we like words enough to have a discussion about them. As one of my professors used to say, "Words mean things. Pay attention!" I'm not talking about pompous, self-conscious, show-offy words for their own sake, but the expanded vocabulary of an author's unique craft and vision.

Last night was my first night at my new Great Books group. I was invited in November and finally managed to make a meeting (blame the holidays). The quality of the discussion was first-rate. I was impressed by the courtesy with which the very opinionated members treated each other, while strongly disagreeing on what Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths had to say about space, time, cowardice, mazes, fiction, the human condition, and the nature of reality. It was a very positive experience, although C.S. says twice a month would be too much for him.

And I especially enjoyed the part where almost all of us admitted that we'd had to look up "pullulation" and then discussed whether "swarming" would have been a better choice by this particular translator. That's when I knew I was really onto something.