Qingdao has an English language bookclub. It amazes me. The city has a big enough Anglophonic community to support a bookclub. It’s wonderful!
I have always loved bookclubs. My mother belongs to a bookclub that has been meeting for about 25 years. When I was a little girl their meetings always looked so sophisticated. It was the one part of her life that wasn’t for children that I was allowed to see.
When the meetings were at our house, my sister and I had to stay upstairs and be very quiet. We caught glimpses of my mother and her friends. They were so well-dressed and so smart. That was what adulthood looked like.
In the mid-nineties, bookclubs became huge. Oprah started her club in 1996. Then Seattle started their “One City, One Book” program, and dozens of towns copied the idea. Some critics found this trend big-brotherly. Harold Bloom spoke out against it, unless the clubs read books on his approved list.
In 2001 Oprah wanted her club to read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. The author complained that the Oprah club was too middle-brow for the serious work of fiction he had produced. Franzen looked like a jerk, but he also made bookclubs seem totally square.
I have always been a book nerd, so the social stigma didn’t bother me. I started my first bookclub after I graduated from law school. It was made up of my girlfriends who were all in their late twenties and early thirties. We read some fantastic books, a few lousy ones, and we had a great time discussing them over wine and chips.
For a while, I was in two bookclubs. There was the group I had formed with my friends, and there was the St. John’s College Alumni bookclub. I didn’t go to St. John’s, but my father did, and I went to the meetings with him. Joshua went to St. John’s, and he and I met at one of those meetings. We had similar thoughts on “Mother Courage and Her Children” and we have been reading together ever since.
The Qingdao bookclub is a little more complicated. Books in English are hard to get, so we have to borrow them from each other. It works surprisingly well.
We have books here in Qingdao, and now we have people to share them with. This city is really starting to feel like home.
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How wonderful. Our book club had it’s planning meeting last night, and scheduled the whole year. At our house it’s going to be The Places In Between, by Rory Stewart, about his walk across Afganistan. Our club is actually more than 30 years old, with still some original members, as well as relative newcomers (only 17 years.) I am so proud you think fondly of our meetings, and that we made a good impression on you. And so happy you have found kindred spirits; you’re at home in your soul. xoxxomom
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Do you have a first book picked out? Can’t wait to hear how it goes. Glad to hear you’re settling in there. Is Josh into the book club too?
Last night I dragged myself to the first fall SJC meeting, all by my lonesome. I was dreading it a little because I was tired and didn’t like the book - A Passage to India. But the discussion was fun and got my brain working. It still didn’t make me like the reading, but at least some good comments came out. The next few ones look good - a Sunday morning Darwin and Donuts meeting I’ll have to miss, a little more evolution with Dawkins and SJ Gould, the Ovid. Will fill you in more as they come up. xxx
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Like your mom, I am proud that our book club got a mention on this blog. I was a founder (with Barbara) of this Book Club. I had been in a Book Club when we lived in Minneapolis that met every week!! I had no children then and could easily read a book a week. My memories of that book club in Minneapolis are that we were introduced there , by one of our South American members, to a book that had just been translated into English. It was called One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was instantly fascinated with that book, long before it became famous. I memorized the first paragraph sort of accidentally because I loved it so much.
We Book Club Ladies in Queen Village always loved it when you and Molly came down to visit us.
P.S. I know a couple of kids who lived in this house who took Mr. Grillet’s class, and I intend to forward that entry to them.