Book clubs are bad for you

And not just because of the huge amount of wine consumed during them

Book clubs are bad for your reading habits. I know this might be an heretical statement, but I do think that enforced reading turns it into a duty rather than a delight. It can also remove that wonderful moment about 100 pages into a novel, when instead of you deciding when to read it, and for how long, the book takes the reins and you simply cannot be separated from it. Until the end, which you dread, because it signifies the termination of a significant relationship.

Andriy Popov/Alamy

I was thinking about this when reading this column by my lovely former BBC colleague Adrian Chiles, who after doing an English degree several decades ago (and a flirtation with Kindle) has gone back to the paperback. And not via a Book club.

Of course there are notable exceptions to what a book club can deliver. I met three lovely women at a party last weekend who had all met via their book club, and whose club was sufficiently strong to withstand excursions designed on the theme of the book (the Anna Karenina-themed trip to Russia is on hold), but in my experience, the book club becomes a) an excuse to get pissed or b) an exercise in furious speed reading, since for some reason you didn’t open the book until about an hour before the meeting.

However. They are a thing and have been for about 34 years. I pride myself (slightly) on spotting the trend way, way back; in 1992, to be precise. At the time, book clubs were so unusual that I managed to get this piece covering the phenomenon away in the Indy. I remember going to an incredibly exclusive dining club in Covent Garden and interviewing six women who were all reading Balzac’s Old Goriot. It was extremely impressive. I had never even heard of Old Goriot.

Book Clubs were suddenly Huge. They turned up on TV via Richard and Judy, complete with WH Smith tie-in (now there’s a sad loss). There was a feature film made about them, (Book Club) and a sequel (Book Club, the Next Chapter). The latest episode is TikTok. #BookTok has achieved over 220 billion views.

I’m not in one any more, but like Chiles, am buzzing having reawakened that important connection. Counter intuitively, Substack has helped. Two Substacks I am extremely attached to, James Marriot’s Cultural Capital and India Knight’s Home both champion the deliciousness of sitting down, alone, with a book.

I recommend them strongly to anyone who wants to have a little nudge back into being a bookworm. I’ve just opened this, Eric Ravilious Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries, from The Mainstone Press, after a mention in Home.

It is such a lovely book. So sad, because much of the writing in it is propelled by the death of Ravilious at only 39, lost in a plane crash over Iceland during the Second World War (he was a commissioned War Artist, and the first British war artist to die on active service), but so beautiful as every page is illustrated by his astonishing watercolours, woodcuts and commercial designs for everything from London Transport posters to Coronation mugs and Wedgwood dinner sets.

Children in a Park, (1926) Wood Engraving

There is also much given to the fact that he was a particularly “English” artist, and what that meant in the interwar period.

I have also gone for another suggestion from India, namely The Eater Guide to Paris, which is a glorious tome full of brilliant suggestions about where to eat fantastically in Paris, once the heatwave has subsided.

Oui! Oui!

“But we could always have looked on the Eater website,” cries my husband as I rip open (yet another) parcel from a bookshop.

Yes, but I am so bored with referring to screens, always. I want to be back in Analogue Land. I want something to hold in my hand, to underline, to scribble little references to. I want to tick the restaurants which I already know (only two, frankly, in this whole survey), and underline the ones I would like to visit.

This brings me to my cousin Judith, who came to visit me with a big parcel the other day. “This is for your 60^th birthday,” she said, “and I have taken advice on it.”

Knowing I’m about to start a French degree she has bought me 10 French classics. In French. Here they are on my shelf.

I’ve got four years to get through them. What a wonderful gift, which beckons me to the immediate future while acknowledging the past. You might be interested in the selection, and have other suggestions. If so, please do make them.

I’ve already opened this one. Of course.

I have come full circle; like Chiles, I feel rather smug when I get my novel out of a bag on the tube. Of course I am as addicted to my phone as everyone else, but I feel better, more refreshed and satisfied when I leave it in the bottom of my backpack and reach for Old Goriot (in English!) Yes, when I looked up the cutting from all those years ago I realised I’m reading the same book as that original book club.

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