Strangers become friends!
Are you a member of a book club or a reading group? I just discovered that 2019 marks my ninth year with my book club. We’re a bit discombobulated and quite a chatty bunch, but it’s always been a staple in my calendar because there’s something quite magical about people getting together to talk about books.
Whenever you meet a stranger and discover a mutually loved author, don’t you feel, in some small way, like you know this person? That you might have just made a new friend? I think that is what makes book clubs so special. You don’t have to be close in real life, your paths may only ever cross every last Wednesday of the month, but those few hours aren’t about jobs and kids and to-do lists but about an in-the-moment sharing of an experience. And not just any experience either, but an intensely personal and often emotional one. It’s curious, really, and wonderful, the way you get to know the members of your group over time, learn their personalities and catch glimpses of their hopes and fears and dreams through the prism of the story you read together.
Read outside your comfort zone
Over the years, we’ve read across a range of commercial fiction and biographies, history and crime. I’ve been jolted out of my reading comfort zone and tried out things I’d never have picked up otherwise. I’ve read books that I loved and cursed and a few that I *ahem* didn’t finish. It doesn’t really matter what book is chosen, though, it’s what it unlocks in each and every one around the table, what it gives us to talk about and argue over and empathise with, how very differently we all read — and what ultimately brings a disparate group of strangers together over a shared love of books.
IRL book clubs or online?
If you don’t have a book club in your area, there are some wonderful online and Facebook reading groups, where readers, bloggers and authors talk incessantly about books. Email me if you’d like some recommendations — although beware — your ‘to-read’ pile will NEVER be the same. My favourite recent experience, however, was taking Summer of Secrets to a neighbourhood book club. I was so nervous beforehand, but I shouldn’t have been at all — the book clubbers asked amazing questions and I was touched at how closely they’d read the story. Needless to say, I left feeling I had made a whole slew of new friends — and the firm conviction that readers really are the nicest people in the world!
