The joys of book club

When we moved here, in June 2022, we met various lovely neighbours including a couple along the road who have been here much longer than we have but are incomers like us.  There are quite a few people here who have moved in from other areas as well as plenty with deep roots and family connections in this part of North Wales.  I often find it hard to tell which is which as everyone is generally very welcoming and friendly.  This is interesting as it is not always the case.  When my parents were alive and lived in Devon there was a clear divide between "real locals" and incomers in one of the villages they moved to which I just haven't noticed round here.

Quite soon after we got here this particular neighbour floated the idea of a book club.  I can't quite remember how a number of us met in our local pub to discuss the idea but there was lots of interest and enthusiasm and quite quickly there was the inevitable Whats App group and an agreement to meet at a room in the pub on the evening of the third Wednesday of every month.  There are about thirty of us in the group although the attendance tends to vary from fifteen or so up to twenty two or twenty three.  We are mostly women (of a certain age as Gregg Wallace would say!) although we have two men as very welcome  members and a couple of younger women.  

Now I am a voracious reader, generally getting through three or four books a week, and I have been in book clubs before but this one is something special.  I think the quite large number of members allows for a really wide range of suggestions and opinions.  There is lively and sometimes noisy discussion and disagreement but the disagreement tends to lead to laughter not anger and there is real respect for other views and courtesy and warmth when we talk about what we have read.  The group is beautifully chaired, managed, whatever you might call it with the lightest hand by Donna who suggested it.  We never find ourselves having finished the discussion in half an hour and simply chatting and drinking wine instead, which has certainly happened in other book groups!  It is an hour and a half or so of intensely book based talk!

Perhaps I am particularly sensitive at the moment with the new leadership in the US which seems to reflect an ever more polarised society,  brashly rude and intolerant of criticism, but this monthly reminder of what intelligent discussion can be and of how differences of opinion can be handled really lifts my spirits every month without fail.  The world has not been reduced to a shouting match in the Oval Office and insults flying on social media.  Generosity, subtlety, kindness and humour remain.

And I have read some books I would simply not have come across without book club.  I hadn't realised that I had got rather stuck in my ways but I think I had fallen victim to the way sites like Amazon make suggestions to you based on what you have already read, not at all unreasonably but not likely to throw you a curve ball and open your mind to something outside your normal realm of reading matter.

Here are three books which I would never have read without book club and all of them are wonderful discoveries:

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

This is set in a hotel in Moscow just after the Russian revolution.  The gentleman in question is an aristocrat, placed under what is essentially a form of house arrest.  He stays there for years.  It sounds the unlikeliest setting for a book.  But the humanity and warmth of the main character and the fantastic writing make it funny, uplifting, compulsively readable.   I loved it.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Set in Ethiopia and the United States this is the story of a young boy who becomes a surgeon.  I knew nothing about Ethiopia.  I know practically nothing about surgery.  This is a big book but I read it at a gallop to the extent that in a year or so I shall read it again.  It is one of those rare books which subtly changes the way you look at the world.

As does this last one

The Pearl that broke its Shell by Nadia Hashimi

This contains two parallel stories of Shekiba in Afghanistan in the early 1900s and her great great grandaughter Rahimi more than a hundred years later.  Rahimi is one of five daughters and between the ages of around nine and thirteen she dresses and lives as a boy under the tradition of bachu posh where a family without sons can use a daughter to go out into the world in a way in which a girl cannot, to shop, to play, to be educated.  Then at thirteen she is married off to a man almost thirty years her senior.  Again I would never have picked this up but if I hadn't I would have missed something wonderful, eye opening and extraordinary.

So thank you to book club.  How funny that a small group of people meeting in a little village should remind you so powerfully that people are clever and funny and kind and interesting.  The best of humanity in the front room of a pub.