For many years, the second Wednesday of each month was a lifeline for me. It was the one night when I’d get a babysitter, put on lipstick and pants with buttons, and leave the house for book club. For several years, I even organized the informal ward book club, where I was responsible for how we picked books, who hosted and led discussions, and (most importantly), who brought the treats.
When I started teaching Mormon Lit, I got in front of the class the first day and said something along the lines of, “In this class we will read great books, we will share ideas, and we’ll have a lot of fun. I’m here to give some background information and facilitate discussion, but you’re going to do most of the talking. In fact, I think it will be a lot like a book club.” I thought I was making a great case for not dropping the class, but I saw about half of the eyes of my students glaze over immediately. I’d lost all of the guys.
And then I realized my error.
Guys don’t do book club.
In the last few years, I’ve thought about the gendered nature of the American book club quite a bit. In all my years of book clubbing, there was only one time when I guy came to the discussion (a husband who was a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and asked his wife if he could come along, and who proceeded to look pained and miserable all night long). At the time, I thought it might be because every meeting of the club regulars (mostly Mormon women in their 20s and early 30s) inevitably devolved into a discussion about the horrors of childbirth. I’m pretty sure that The Road had no connections whatsoever to childbirth, but we managed to steer the discussion in that direction anyway. In fact, one of the reasons that I’m no longer a regular book clubber is because I was frustrated that I put a lot of effort into reading a book (or, more often, rereading something I’d already read before), and like the good former English major I was, marking it up and writing questions in the margins, to come to a meeting, talk about the book for ten minutes, have a fight about whether or not we should read books with sex and the f-word, and spend the rest of the night talking about cracked nipples and potty training. I guess I can see why most guys wouldn’t be into that.
America’s tradition of book clubs began even before there was a United States of America. Anne Hutchinson started a group to study the Bible in 1634, before her ship reached the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Ben Franklin founded a salon (which he called Junto) to discuss books in 1727. Since the mid 1860s, book clubs seems both aligned with the women’s movement, and somewhat disparaged by men. Read about it all here. And, of course, there’s Oprah, whose name is synonymous with the book club and whose stamp of approval can launch a career into superstardom.
In the United States, more than 56% of women who read more than one book a month are in a book club. This infographic lays out all sorts of interesting information about those book clubs, including the statistic that book club attendance seems to increase with age (which is the opposite of my personal experience). Interestingly, they don’t even include men in the survey, which seems to support the idea that book clubs are seen as exclusively (or at least generally) feminine activities. It’s true that when I recommend books that I think would be good book club books in a book review, it’s because they’re highly readable, provide interesting avenues for discussion, and deal in subject matter that women would like (which is why I think Oprah’s recent pick of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, is an interesting pick. His other work isn’t super accessible, and this book has been described as being similar to The Orphan Master’s Son, which, if there’s such thing as a guy’s book, is definitely a guy’s book).
I think it’s also interesting that book clubs and book groups founded by guys usually eschew the term. Franklin referred to his as a salon (and a salon with a pretentious club name). When Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and WH Auden founded their book group, they called it the Great Books Foundation, which is basically a glorified book club of “important” works. The book group some of the AML guys attend also has a fancy name– The Mormon Literature Discussion Group. So is the key to getting guys to come to book club not talking about nursing, or is it giving it a name that confers it with an additional sense of importance?
I’m not sure, but I’ll bring the pie.
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I’ve always been jealous of the book club in our ward that I don’t get to go to (though I’ve eavesdropped when it’s happened at my house). Sometimes I read the books along with my wife so we can talk about them before she goes.
A ward a friend of mine was in had a men’s bookclub called Bros and Prose. They would read a book on their own then come together to play a thematically related video game.
I think a big part of the problem, asking around, is that men don’t perceive themselves as having time to read. Sometimes that means at all and sometimes that means a book outside what they are otherwise reading. And the promise of hanging out and talking about it isn’t enough to overcome the time issue.
Do singles wards have book clubs? I would have been into it….
Maybe another problem is that men and women assume they won’t like each other’s choices? I can imagine that
I loved my book group when it was still running–we generally talked about the Book for at least 30 minutes before talking about childbirth. 😉 interestingly, the couple of times we invited guys (once to talk about Desert Solitaire and I can’t remember the other time), the men dominated the conversation–to the point that we decided not to include them again!
Shelah, yes, the Mormon Literature Discussion Group name is a bit stuffy. We are definitely not tied to it. We’ve been so concentrated on the reading and discussion that we haven’t thought of anything better. And we would love to have you come out when you can!
About a year ago, we started a book club in my ward (though not ward-sponsored). It was my idea, but actually came out of the fact that there are several of the roughly retirement-age men in our ward who read a LOT. (More than I do.) The book club is mostly couples, with the single exception being me, ironically. (My wife thinks she’s too busy to do it, for now at least.) The men probably talk more on average than the women do, but it’s only a 60/40 thing (and probably tilted in part by me being in the group). But then, we’re far away from Utah…
The only book clubs I’ve been in that were successful were couples book clubs. And the conversations were pretty well balanced in terms of conversation time. We had an all men book club in one ward that was something of a disaster. The conversation got political, heated, and we all left wondering what the hell just happened.
I think I must have has a stellar book club. We read things like Cokie Robert’s’ bio. Yes, an LDS book club.