Do I really need a book club?

It is such an isolating feeling to finish a book you hate or love and have no one to speak with about it. I am perpetually frustrated when I reach the tear-drenched last pages of a woefully good but heart wrenching book and have no one to share in my misery with. When I close that book, I find myself clamouring to revive the characters, live on with the ones I loved so dearly and moan about the ones I hate so eagerly. It truly is a lonely feeling when you have been so invested in a world, a character and a story and it ends abruptly forever. You’ve lived in this world sometimes for months, and suddenly you’re the last person standing.

I thought this was going to be my lifelong plight of reading.

Until I joined a bookclub.

My friend and I recently were bouncing off each other our thoughts of Jane Eyre as we lay on the hill next to a cloudy beach. It was revitalising to have someone to share my thoughts with on a book I adored. Then it dawned on us, how great would it be if we had a collective of other people to dive into a fictional world together?

So we started the Literary Ladies Society.

We had our first meet up recently after reading the long and challenging work of Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. But it was arduous. The only thing that kept me going was the thought that all these ladies and I were in the same boat (and the utter humiliation of being the only person who didn’t read the book.)

When the time finally came to join our heads together, our thoughts exploded.

There were so many conflicting, passionate opinions in the room.

“My favourite character was Lucie…”
”Uh I couldn’t stand Lucie! She was so naive…”
”No way, she was an angel!”

Back and forth we went for two hours over candlelight reviving the lives of the characters we loved and hated and leaping back into that world we inhabited for two months. I felt like my reading dreams came true. It was such a revitalising feeling to debrief my thousand thoughts with different heads in the room.

A little word of wisdom, join a book club! Even if it’s with a group of little old ladies who meet at the library once a month. It’s a beautiful way to create community over a shared interest that is almost free, entirely healthy and a great, old-school moment of connection.

Bell Hooks echoes this thought beautifully:

“For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community.”