My Reading Party Has No Interest in Joining Your Book Club
Passersby must be alarmed when they first see a silent reading party, without knowing what it is. Here are a few dozen people in a public place with their noggins dutifully turned down, all reading at the same time. It can't be organic. That many people don’t read in proximity at once in public.
It looks like a silent protest, the beginnings of an elaborate art heist, or an initiation for a dorky cult or fraternity. But you learn it's a party. They read, they chat for a few minutes, and then they go back to reading. Take that, local book club.
And they mean it. In looking at the genesis behind numerous reading parties across the country, they often define themselves in opposition to the traditional book club. A reading party is supposed to be fun, whereas a book club conjures up childhood feelings of not doing the homework. Reading parties suggest they offer an alternative where you don't have to meet a deadline, or all read the same book you didn't choose, or listen to everyone's interpretation while worrying that your own opinion completely misreads the story. “Those two characters were brothers,” someone might correct you with. “Oh... I see.”
That kind of humiliation never occurs at a mostly stress-free reading party. You can read whatever you want: a book, an article, an old letter from an ex, the back of a cereal box. And the material can be in any form, whether paperback or Kindle or Speak & Spell. The idea is to take a normally solitary activity like reading and add in socializing, but not too much. People can chat in short bursts and then retreat into their book, as opposed to reading alone at home with a glass of wine that's half tears, and convincing themselves it counts as doing something.
At one I recently attended for the first time, my book was Moby Dick, which I recognize is obnoxious. If I was at a reading party and saw someone reading Moby Dick or War and Peace, it would come up. “Did you buy that before coming here to look smart?” I’d snort. But I happened to be reading it at the time. Prior to that it was Far Side cartoons.
I slapped Moby Dick on the table and introduced myself. The conversation is about what you'd expect, with “What are you reading?” charting as the main opener. People brought short story collections, self-help books, technical manuals, fantasy novels, and more than a few of those bestsellers the culture insists you read.
The host acts as a sort of reading scorekeeper and lets everyone know when it's time for silent reading, and then when it's time to put the books down and awkwardly chat. In each section, I wanted it to go on a little longer. I went from thinking “Please don't make me go back to reading,” to later stopping myself from saying to the guy next to me, “You interrupted Ahab's thrilling speech to tell me this inane shit about yourself?”
Will reading parties do to book clubs what potlucks did to the box social? Hard to say. Most of the people in attendance had a slight issue with book clubs when the topic came up (because I brought it up), though one woman was reading a book from her book club, which seems incestuous.
Book clubs have a grating association. One is likely to encounter annoying personality archetypes there, and often the host goes with choices that are exactly what the host of a book club would mistakenly think is interesting. But it's not like reading parties are a jamboree. I felt a little silly reading quietly with a group of strangers.
Maybe book clubs can be a little more relaxed, assign a little less homework, and go with books that appeal to the club-averse crowd. And maybe reading parties can engender more to bond on than simply reading a book in proximity to someone, and not being tested on it. But I hope the two go to war. I hope reading party reps infiltrate book clubs and propose reading different books, and club members crash reading parties and start rogue clubs within it. Because then the two will annihilate each other, and I’ll feel less lazy. I tend to react to public reading the way I react to public CrossFitters: Please, just keep the self-improvement at home.