Reading Groups: The Crucial Factor
This post first appeared in The Reader magazine issue 28.
Once wrongly dismissed as something for bored housewives with nothing better to do, The Reading Group is now a hugely popular idea made real. Whatever form it takes, be it academic or domestic, formal or informal, general or specialist, always at its very centre lies the honourable intention to read and talk about books in company.
Most people who join book groups are already committed readers, yet in discussions one frequently hears someone’s thoughtful idea followed up by ‘But of course I’m not an expert’. I am afraid that too many people think they have to have literary qualifications or a specialist language in order to talk knowledgeably about what they have read. Anyone for whom reading is a serious pleasure will have something to say about the book currently chosen, but it is not always easy to put into words the tangle of thoughts that go on in the act of reading itself. It is one thing to read but quite another to talk about or even to write about reading. Sometimes our thinking is not even formulated into coherent thoughts, but is somehow felt and held at some pre-verbal level. Yet the effort of trying to pull random thoughts and impressions together into some sort of order and meaning can be exhilarating and rewarding. The best groups will offer the context and supportive company in which each member can try to give public expression to their own private response to a book. That means not resorting too quickly to shorthand opinions or overstated likes and dislikes.
Good books are meeting grounds. But the meeting ground (the book) is not a limited space; it expands as more people put their minds to it. The reading group means we are all in it together, giving and taking and allowing the book to open up in discussion. ‘I never knew there was so much in it’ is an exclamation that entirely proves the value of reading groups. I may be describing an ideal reading group and an ideal is not always attainable, but I have led and participated in reading groups of various sorts for many years and in that time believe I have come to know what makes for a successful session and what does not.
The problems for reading groups are twofold: the choice of book and the discussion. I shall deal with the book first.
Too many of us are being lured by the hype of promoters. Most fiction publishers have a reading-group section to their websites offering suggestions (from their own lists of course) and tips for how to get the discussion going. Literary festivals pop up everywhere offering the latest things, and nearly everyone attending will belong to a book group. Richard and Judy began their staggeringly successful
book group in 2002 (and we have more to say about that here). Literary prizes with highly publicised long lists and short lists proliferate. Good book blogs are numerous and a recommendation from one of the most visited can hugely affect sales on Amazon. Publishers, through clever marketing strategies, control promotions and try to direct our reading. But I want to suggest that too many of these books are delivering a disappointingly thin reading experience. It is all very well for a book to carry the tag ‘achingly beautiful prose’ but what is the point of beautiful prose about nothing much? There is much fatter, more satisfying reading to be found. So how are we to choose the best books if we cannot always trust prize-givers and publishers? Choosing contemporary fiction, like the latest food fad, exercise or fashion accessory, is always going to be problematic. I therefore want reading groups to ask themselves, what do we read for? If the answer is, in order to speak knowledgeably of the latest Amis, McEwan, or Atwood at dinner parties, then look no further. But if the answer is in order to read novels, poetry and plays that delve into the human experience; that offer a creative means of thinking and reflecting upon life, then I want to get rid of the almost automatic assumption that contemporary elite novelists or prize-winning books are necessarily the best and most relevant things to read. Too many times I hear from reading groups: ‘Our annual classic choice was…’ as if one classic novel per year was some sort of penance to be paid. At a recent workshop on Jane Eyre, of the dozen or so people sitting round a table there was not one who had not either read the book or seen the film. Some had had to study it for exams, some had liked it, some had been bored by it and so on. Together we read the passage in which Jane, having discovered that Rochester is already married, wrestles with her conscience and her passion.
‘Who in the world cares for you? Or who will be injured by what you do?’ Still indomitable was the reply: ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad as I am now. Laws and principles are not for times when there is no temptation: they are for moments like this… Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations are all I have at this hour to stand by; there I plant my foot.’
As we listened to the words of the passage, spoken out loud in the quiet room, it was as if all previous readings fell away and we heard the words for the first time. In the sheer strength of the lonely girl finding, at this crucial moment, the firmness of her own voice, the old book almost magically became new again. I am saying that the old classics of literature can be new books if we allow them to be so. We should not be so blinkered as to think that because books like Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the D’Urbervilles or A Christmas Carol are so familiar, they have nothing new to say to us. On the contrary; every new reading will yield new thoughts, if we leave old opinion behind. In matters of reading choices, we want reading groups to be able to turn to The Reader, for it is the purpose of this magazine to offer trustworthy recommendations for good reading from any age.
But having found a good book, how are we to begin to talk about it together? I hear from members of many groups that the discussion can all too frequently be a disappointing experience. A group in the Midlands tells us that their discussion of Tess of the D’Urbervilles hardly got beyond the problem of the siting of a motorway close by twenty-first-century Stonehenge. Several web sites exist to give tips and hints of how to get a discussion going. They offer a list of questions that frankly have more than a whiff of school exam papers about them. Under a title of ‘Starting points for discussion’, a guide for David Copperfield offers the following unhelpful suggestion:
In his recent biography of the author, Peter Ackroyd claimed that London was for Dickens ‘an emblem of forgetfulness.’ Copperfield, in its record of the perpetual destruction and rebuilding of London, would seem to indicate this but is there anything redeemable about the city as it is portrayed in the novel? What about urban life? What is London’s relation to Yarmouth?
This is emphatically not a starting point but a killing off of any hope of spontaneity; of any suggestion that there could be a personally felt understanding of the book. It is a brilliant example of how not to read a novel. I couldn’t care less about London’s relation to Yarmouth, but I do care about the indelible damage done to a small boy forced into degrading work in a blacking factory, causing the writer he grew up to be to admit:
The deep remembrance of the sense I had, of being utterly without hope now; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that day by day what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in,… would pass away from me, little by little, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written.
Years later and still he cannot bear to give words to the feeling so deeply scored upon his memory of fear, shame and utter loss of all the delight a child has the right to expect. How can this sustained vision of life without hope fail to move? I want to insist upon the primacy of the human response. To that end, let’s not bother reading the scholarly introduction before the book, or the literary essays on the internet, or York Notes–indeed let’s forget the term ‘literary criticism’ and not try to turn novels into vehicles for social and historical theoretical criticism.
Group dynamics can be difficult. Discussion groups with no leader run the risk of breaking up into small factions all talking at once, or allow one voice to dominate to the increasing irritation of everyone else. I have seen how a sarcastic comment ‘Of course this is just mawkish sentimentality’ from an influential group-member has silenced a less confident member who had found the book deeply meaningful. On the other hand, a teacher of English Literature in a local secondary school told me that she had to give up attending her reading group as all the members were too inhibited by her presence. She felt they expected her to ‘put them right’ as if there were simply right and wrong answers and they could get it wrong.
The most common method by which book groups proceed is for each member to come to the meeting having read the book and then someone begins by giving a short talk about the book before opening up the discussion. Alternatively, each member, in turn, gives his or her opinion of the book before a more general discussion takes place. How can this airing of judgment and attitude possibly be the best way to begin? Such methods will close down rather than open up the book because they start from finishing a book not re-entering it. The whole point of the reading group is to share the experience of the book. Groups need to start from specific places and read their way into it together, in company, as if reading were the best form of thinking. I recall a group reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion. We began with a passage which one member had chosen because she had found it difficult to understand; a feeling echoed by the rest of the group. She read the passage to the rest of us. Anne Elliot, having been persuaded by her aunt not to marry the man she loves, finds herself seven years later, miserably on the shelf. I am not going to quote the example itself this time. All I will say is that reading it aloud slowed things down. Yet even so this passage was terribly hard to read and she made frequent stumbles. It was the realisation of this difficulty that prompted someone to suggest that the difficulty in reading aloud the passage so full of twists and turns was related to the difficulty we experienced in understanding it. For we were in fact listening to a mind at work, moving back and forth, thinking in waves of feeling and thought and reflection on thought and feeling. It is, as the group went on to realise, not always easy to get to the bottom of what we know and what we feel is not automatically translated into thought.
In order to share the experience of reading a book or a poem together, we should get rid of ‘hardened opinion’ and start afresh with open attentiveness as if we were the first reader of the book. There is the book and there are the readers and that is enough. Let each member, during the course of their reading, mark or make a note of any passages where they were simply moved, or excited or puzzled or felt that something important was happening. Let each meeting begin, not with the usual overview: ‘What did you think of the book?’ but with the reading aloud of one of the particular chosen passages. Something happens when we read aloud. You have only to think back to the times you read to your child or were yourself read to. How at certain times the words of the book seemed to wrap themselves around you, making a world of the book from which you would both emerge, as the book closed, blinking and staring at the familiar strangeness of your bedroom. A few weeks ago in a reading group of elderly care home residents a woman, blind, in her nineties and still powerfully alert asked me if I had something by Rupert Brooke. ‘I used to pass a statue of him every morning on my way to school,’ she said, ‘and he was so handsome I said to myself that if I should ever have a son, I would like him to look like that man–and he did.’ In a hasty rummage through the poetry books I had with me, I found only one poem, ‘The Soldier’, and my heart sank. But she was all urgent expectancy. I began to read, slowly and deliberately:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
Looking up I saw her sitting bolt upright, her sightless eyes boring into me as she listened with every fibre of her being. All around the other people seemed to create a force-field of attention, and suddenly for me as it had done for them, this cheesy old poem came vitally alive:
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind.
When I finished there was a long silence as if no one wanted to break the moment of highly charged, shared experience. I did not know then, neither do I think that other members knew, that her son had been killed in a freak accident just three years earlier.
Reading aloud is the crucial factor. As one voice reads to a community of attentive listeners, the book is brought to life again; becomes a strong reality; a binding force. Try to stay, as it were, inside the passage and let the power of the written language sink in. Feelings that arise from the reading will pass into thoughts that in turn may become spoken. The personal response of each member of the group is the real starting point.
The Reader’s decade-long campaign to recommend and promote the best literature has faced charges of elitism and cultural snobbery. To these charges we would answer that this is the very opposite of what we believe in. Our magazine and community projects exist to promote the good in literature, with the belief that reading can be serious and fun, life-enhancing and creative for everyone. Yes we are linked [less closely these days] to a university, but this puts us in a good position to try to ensure that great books are not trapped in the exclusiveness of academic establishments but are freed to be enjoyed by ordinary readers in their own homes. Wordsworth did not write The Prelude so that generations of students could struggle with exam papers. Nor did Shakespeare write for an academic elite. If the prospect of beginning War and Peace, for example, for the first time, with all the attendant weight of years of scholarly criticism behind it is a daunting one, what better way to begin can there be but to embark with the support of your reading group. That is the help and the discipline a group determination can provide. The Reader would like reading groups to subscribe to the magazine because it offers a service and responds to a need–not only specifically, in terms of lively practical recommendations, but as an alternative community that meets on the page at least.
By Angela Macmillan
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