A few years ago, a college friend called me on my birthday. He’d been feeling, he said, a little isolated — not lonely exactly, but cut off. His work life had shifted, most of his colleagues were younger, and the jokes and comments he’d make in Zoom meetings and on Slack weren’t landing the way he’d hoped. In at least one case, an offhand remark he delivered during a Microsoft Teams meeting inspired a concerned email from HR. He needed, he said, a safe space. People his own age. People who would get it.
He suggested a book club.
There were five of us scattered across the country, and the idea was simple: Rotate choosing books, meet on Zoom once a month, and talk about what we’d read. That was four-and-a-half years ago. We’ve read 54 books. Nobody has quit, though there have been moments.
We try to keep the choices interesting, alternating fiction and nonfiction, classics and new releases, highbrow and, well, less highbrow. The idea is to keep it lively. But not too lively.
We bounce around. One month it’s Dante‘s Inferno, the next it’s a Michael Lewis page-turner. One month it’s Flannery O’Connor, the next it’s a book about Bitcoin. The range is part of the point — nobody gets to plant a flag and declare the book club their personal seminar.
Except, it turns out, me. Since enrolling at Princeton Theological Seminary a few years ago, my picks have gotten, how to put this, increasingly ambitious, though you could also say “pompous.” We’re talking Barabbas. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And most recently, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a dense, sprawling study of myth and archetype that I had always meant to read and never quite gotten around to. The book club, I have discovered, is an excellent mechanism for finally reading the books you’ve been meaning to read for decades — because now you have to. But, of course, so do four other people.
My friends were polite about Campbell. Mostly. There was some eye-rolling at the more cosmic passages — it is, I’ll admit, a little woo-woo in places — but they engaged with it.
The important thing, I’ve learned, is not to take it personally when someone doesn’t love your pick. The book is just the excuse. What we’re really doing is scheduling time with each other, which is harder than it sounds at our age. We’re busy. We’re scattered. Left to our own devices, months go by. The book gives us a reason to show up.
So you have to hold your choices loosely. It’s not a referendum on your taste or your intelligence. It’s just a book.
I know this. I believe this. Which is why I’m a little embarrassed about what happened when one of our members — not me, I want to be clear, not me — chose Parker Posey’s autobiography, You’re on an Airplane.
There was trouble.
At our meeting to discuss it, one member was grouchy from the start, and then suddenly erupted. He declared it a waste of time, resented the hours spent reading it that were now “lost forever,” and announced that on his deathbed, he would “shout curses” at the member who had chosen it.
The grouch was me. But you probably knew that.
What was clear, even in that moment, to the four faces in the Zoom squares watching me deliver my litany of grievances, was that I wasn’t really talking about Parker Posey. I was having a bad day, maybe a bad month. I was, to use the popular phrase, “going through some stuff.” The book, which is actually sort of charming now that I think about it, was just the nearest target to hand. My friends knew it. They let me finish. Then someone changed the subject, the way old friends do.
Every book club has a jerk in it. If you don’t know who that is in yours, well, I have some bad news for you. But I have some good news, too. The people in the club with you, if you’ve chosen your friends wisely over the decades, already knew you could be a jerk. They already knew you’d propose some pretentious titles and lose it over nothing. And they still want to be in the book club with you.
Because the best book clubs are never really about the books.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
