The Hardwick Women’s Book Club is like a sleepy warm puppy in your lap on a blustery cold night.
At least that’s how I feel about it.
We live in a VERY cold place, where winters are long and summers are wildly short. For this reason we don’t even TRY to hold meetings in the summer—as it’s nearly impossible to get a quorum. Instead we pour forethought and care into our fall and winter meetings, doing our best to keep them well-attended, lively, and easy to manage.
Every book club has its own means of choosing books, but ours has evolved over years into something uniquely our own. Something that works for us and might not work anywhere else. We don’t try to plan more than one or two months ahead, but instead keep a running list of possibilities that we discuss at the end of every meeting. We use our gut, in truth, to see where enough of us show excitement for a book. We’ve learned by hard experience that choosing books in order to MAKE ourselves read them, i.e. boring but supposedly self-improving selections, is a sure-fire flop. No one reads them and we end up having to cancel the meeting.
Two of our members religiously read book reviews, which is an excellent means of getting books onto our radar while they’re still in hardcover. Sometimes we opt to read them ahead of the paperback release, but as we cannot do that often (few of us can buy all new books, though we try!), we pick and choose carefully.
For a good while we leaned heavily toward fiction, but in recent years we’ve moved more toward social analysis and memoir. We still choose fiction for busy months—when making it fun and easy is the only way we’ll pull off a meeting—but in the dead of winter we pick meatier books that raise challenging themes.
My favorite books are the ones we don’t agree about. Given that we’re all left-leaning, middle-class white women in a rural area, we don’t diverge in views all that often. So when we do, it’s fascinating. Best is when the discussion opens with, “I loved this book” followed by “You did?? I couldn’t stand it.”
Often these disagreements come down to personal resonance—i.e. “I admired those choices” versus “I thought those were all rationalizations for selfishness.” For myself, as a writer who comes to these meetings as a reader, I can’t help finding these disagreements incredibly instructive. It’s the heart of character, is it not, to have two people view the same thing through opposing lenses—based only on their own unique moral compass. These are all “nice” women, wanting to good work, so when they disagree, it’s about something deeper in their characters.
A recent example was Educated by Tara Westover. (Is there a book club in the country that HASN’T read this book?) Our own was divided over it. Some of us were fully outraged at what was perpetrated on her. Others, like myself, had doubts. Meaning I felt manipulated by the book, which caused me to wonder about it. And about memoir in general. When a memoir is a tell-all, isn’t writing the book the act of making sure you get the last word? Myself and a couple others wondered at what it means to hear only one side of a dispute. There’s something inherently off-balance in it.
In this case, we had a lively but civil debate that was among the highlights of my winter. The chance to debate with smart and thoughtful women about issues close to our hearts—could anything be better?
I’m pretty certain I’ll keep attending this book club as long as I can drag myself there.
And I’ll keep going home to write notes. Which will someday bloom into characters.