There’s something to be said for reading at gunpoint. Try not to join a book club that employs live rounds, but the particular strain of weaponised obligation and peer pressure that any decent club can afford is, in all honesty, as indispensable for text-based creativity as the ripcord on the parachute.
You won’t want to read all the time; I’d say you shouldn’t read all the time. A book distilled from a bunch of other books will come out invariably papery; all dry and referential. A book is a medium for curating whatever influences you notice and certainly the ones you don’t notice, in the span of about a year or two’s work. If all those influences are books, I’d bet your hands are all kinds of papercut and you’re fast running out of shelf-space.
So, the book club: the monthly dread that everyone else is keeping up with their reading, and that no matter your threshold for anxiety or embarrassment, shirking that dread will have you turning up to say you haven’t read it. That’s alright. If you’re in a club with the people who would mock or disdain that, you’re in the wrong room. What then does it afford, if the consequence of the pressure is nothing much?
It’ll keep books in mind. It’ll keep you aware of your reading. Outside the obliged text of the time-being, you’ll be far more pressed to squeeze in the reading you really want for yourself. You’ll get that sense of mischief back: the reading-under-the-covers, the getting-away-with-it, and if you end up racing to finish one book to give yourself any kind of realistic time for the obliged book, that’s just pure fun.
The club itself: reading, comparing, complaining, recommending, snacking, milling about. A forty minute stretch of nobody mentioning a single book aloud. Ten minutes in the cold after, giddy to get to a copy of the next one up or scheming out your votes for the poll.
So what’s all that together? I’d say that’s taking the art form with the absolute minimum of sensory stimulation—the single most dull and featureless format imaginable with the highest demand for forensic attention to detail—and jam-packing it full of living sensation. Reading is a quiet thing, and you can’t often do it with anyone else. What is there to look forward to at the end of a bad book, except to be rid of a thing you didn’t like? What can you look forward to at the end of a good book, except to quietly lose and grieve without company a thing you’ve ejected yourself right out of?
Good or bad, ten pages or the whole work, the club gives you a fixed reward: a human experience, a sharing, a mind-meld like a mutual dream. The selfless and self-aware realisation that the way you saw things matched up just the same with anyone else. An artefact for the month, to stand on your shelf as a relic of a month’s experience, of a gathering, a feeling, an intention.
Read for reading, sure; read for writing, definitely—but have a structure at the end of it, something to promise an experience, to incentivise such solitary activity. You won’t always need the incentive. Much of the time, you might outright resent it.
But for the hours to get the book done when the impetus isn’t there—when the book isn’t right but you’ve got nothing else to hand and my god didn’t reading just used to be easier?—you’ll be glad of the pressure when you turn up to turn it all into your own words, share it around, argue a little but try to laugh a little more, and realise what you really got out of whatever last page you managed to read.