Not Yer Mother's Book Group

A statement of faith

As we have some new members of the group who've shown some interest in crashing the brownie party -- I mean, who would like to come to book group meetings -- I thought it might be a good idea to clarify what kind of group we have going on here.

As we are homeschooling parents, we have two major goals. One is to achieve a desperately-needed night out with other adults. The other is to educate ourselves as well as our children. We want to be familiar with great writers and works of literature and be able to help our children take pleasure in them. We want to fill in any gaps in our own educations. We want to be able to bench-press two hundred with our bulked-up brains.

(I have no idea what that last one means. I just like to half-listen to people when they talk about going to the gym.)

We read classic works. A rough working definition of that is: over fifty years of age, by a writer whose work would reasonably fit into, say, a world lit class, or "the canon," or even The World's 100 Best Books, or whatever it's called. Something that is a famous title and/or by a famous author. Something with real cultural literacy value.

The reason for this is twofold. First off, the continuing education dealie. Secondly, the fact that reading time is in incredibly short supply for most of us. There's also a dearth of really good contemporary fiction, and just what is a good modern novel is a very subjective call: what may be a life-changing story for one person is this week's yawner for another. When I decided to start this group, I also decided that I didn't want to spend time reading something that I might end up hating -- and for what? If we're reading classics, we may not love every minute of the month's book; but we've still received something of value in exchange for the time we put into reading it. We've followed in the footsteps of countless past readers, sharing an experience that has added something to our language, our culture, our common humanity.

A classic work isn't guaranteed to be an enjoyable reading experience for everyone. It may not even be a completeable one. When we took on A Tale of Two Cities a while back, one of our members gave it her best shot, but it just wasn't there for her. She found a really good online source of summaries of great works. She learned what the book was about, and what the story was. At the book group meeting, we mentioned the really famous bits from the book -- the first and last sentences (I'm still impressed, and a little annoyed, that one novel should have managed to achieve the most memorable beginning and ending lines. It doesn't seem quite fair. Leave something for the rest of us to strive for, would you, Charlie?) that she'd already heard before, but now she knew where they were from. She'd taken something away from the book worth having.

If it had been a contemporary novel we'd been reading, what would she have? Not having finished the book, she could resent the time she'd given to what she'd been able to read. She wouldn't have much to give the conversation about the book, and what other people said couldn't be of much interest to her, unless everyone else had hated it just as much and they all decided to take matters into their own hands and pay an in-person visit to the offending writer, demanding an apology and maybe some monetary compensation for pain and suffering inflicted. If she'd slogged on, determined to throw good time after bad, she might have the grim satisfaction of not having let the silly book beat her, and would certainly be able to give her bitterness a full and thorough venting at the meeting; but why bother? I enjoy a nice bout of bitter as much as the next person (probably more, actually), but even I know a waste of time when I see it.

Another, fairly pragmatic reason for reading the classics is that we're fishing from a smaller pond. I know some groups that will read pretty much anything, and that sounds great except that there are about a billion jillion kaskillion books out there (at last count) and choosing from that dizzying number can get a little difficult. If we're taking a title from the classics, not only have we whittled the list down a bit, but we've also moved away a bit from interminable "I don't know -- what do you feel like reading?" type-conversations.

So: we're looking for age, cultural references, and cultural relevance. We aim for all of those, because if we start picking solely on the basis of, say, age, then we start running into the possibility of reading The Egyptian Book of the Dead at some point; and if it's just cultural relevance, then we start having to steal our kids' copies of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Cultural references -- let's just call it quotability and get on with it -- might be considered the most potentially disposable when deciding on a title, but it's still nice and I'd like to keep it in mind as much as possible. We've piled up a nice collection of quotes, after all, in all our reading. Think about it:

"Reader, I married him." (Jane Eyre)

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." (Tale of Two Cities)

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Anna Karenina in a rare non-farming scene)

"The quality of mercy is not strained." (Merchant of Venice)

"Never pay full price, darling, and never ask anyone how much they paid." (a letter from my great-aunt in Pittsburgh, which, okay, only I read, but still it's pretty darned quotable)

How do we pick the books, now that we know what we're looking for?

Well, we recently compiled a pretty decent and reasonably hefty list of books that would be good for future reads. We'll probably be drawing from that for a while. I'll print out copies of it for the next month's meeting so we can all have one to consult.

We usually like to contrast pretty sharply from one month to the next. I think we read some Dante right after Jane Austen and right before War of the Worlds.

We put books to the vote, but we try to go by consensus rather than majority rule. This can be a little tedious, but bear in mind how thrilled roughly half the population of America is after any perfectly democratic presidential election and you'll see why I'd like to aim at protecting ourselves from the tyranny of the majority. It is absolutely true that I pulled a dictatorial coup last time, and I do apologize. In my own defense, however, I would like to point out that the books chosen were on the running list of books we'd all agreed to; that at the last meeting, we took almost an hour deciding on the next title, and some of the members had had to leave without even knowing what the title would be, so I considered that choosing something quickly was an act of mercy; that two other members were present at the time, and that one of them was reading something by the author in question, which is what gave me the idea; and that I won't do it again and certainly wouldn't have done it this time with a title that I knew any member would actively detest at the get-go. I love Romeo and Juliet, but we'll probably never read it because one regular member mentioned that reading it would make her feel as if she were in high school again. I'd happily do that to my worst enemy, or even to that clerk that sold me the expired yogurt ten minutes before closing time, but not to someone whose company I enjoy.

I hope this clarifies things, and I hope that we see some new faces at our next meeting.

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