Ask the Book Lady

No Time to Read

Okay, I know that outraged librarians and bookstore managers are going to burn me in effigy for this, but let's see what we can do for you that doesn't involve throwing you to the mercy of public book groups. I don't have time here to give particulars as to my bias against these.

Actually, that's not true. When it comes to something I love screaming about, I make time for a good rant, just as you're hoping to convince your friends to make time for a good read. But once I started I might not stop any time soon, and that wouldn't be good for anyone, especially you, who only want an answer to your question. See my essay on the perils of joining a group of total strangers to talk books if you'd like more details.

In order to figure out if you can make the group you want with the people you'd like to include, you need to figure out what the real problem is. The first possibility is that your friends really are worried that they might not be able to fulfill a commitment to read the proposed title every month. That's a very good sign. It means that you've got people who will take the reading seriously, and who really think -- oh, refreshing rarity! -- that the point of a book group is to talk about the book.

Do not -- repeat, not -- give in to any temptation to whine, however accurately, about how they have no trouble making or finding time for all that television they watch, or fooling around on the Internet finding sites that will tell them everything they always wanted to know about the domestic habits of Siberian hamsters. Putting people on the defensive isn't going to bring them round.

Instead, take their complaint at face value. (For now. More on that in a minute.) Tell them that you'll start with really short stuff. Better yet, give them a specific title and page count. Don't make it an actual short story, since they might take that as an insult. Find something that technically qualifies as a full-length work, but that if you used it as a flyswatter, you'd have to hit the little bastard two or three times to do any damage and even then he'd still manage to stagger away, buzzing in an irritated manner.

Here are some ultra-short but solid works you might suggest (I list the authors only when I think they might not be well-known):

• Animal Farm
• Silas Marner
• Candide, by Voltaire
• Brave New World
• The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
• Death in Venice
• Alexander's Bridge, by Willa Cather
• Jacob's Room, by Virginia Woolf
• Any of the Sherlock Holmes novels
• Anything by Colette (French author, wrote lots of hot short novels -- these would be especially good as summer reads, though they'd warm up those winter nights, too)
• One of H. G. Wells' short sci-fi novels: The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau
• Anything by Barbara Pym (British novelist, lots of tea and baked goods)
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold
• Almost anything by Muriel Spark (best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)
• The Stranger, by Camus

(Any play by Shakespeare or an ancient Greek will qualify by page count, but are daunting to those who haven't yet experienced their pleasures. Save them for later, when your group has bulked up their reading muscles a bit.)

For more ideas, take a peek at a book called 100 One-Night Reads: A Book Lover's Guide, by David C. Major and John S. Major.

If, after you wave your lovely little book eagerly before them, your friends murmur about how they're pretty sure they have to shampoo the dog the night the group would meet, then your problem isn't that your friends don't have time to read. I don't have the heart to tell you that they just don't want to read, but it's so. I don't have anything to suggest for that, except to see how much you can get for them on Ebay.

No, wait. You don't have to give up quite that easily. See if you can lure them over with baked goods -- that usually works for me. Bring samples of the killer brownies with you when you propose starting a book group, and hint strongly that the rest of the batch (okay, a whole new one -- let's not get chintzy here) will be waiting at the meeting. But only for good little children who actually did some reading.

Bribery is perfectly acceptable for a worthwhile cause. If you have to do it more than once, though, you might want to reconsider. If the reading doesn't start to seem like its own reward after a while, your conversations are going to be pretty boring and bookless anyway. You might as well go to one of those public book groups after all. Just don't write and tell me how dreary it was. I already know.

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