A Bluestocking Knits

Today’s Booking Through Thursday is about reading groups —

This refers to the reading type of book club, where members all read the same book, then gather to discuss it.

1. Do you, or have you, ever belonged to a book club? No, I never have.  I’ve thought about it, and am still tempted now and then to join one of the two knitting/reading online groups I know of, Knit One, Read Too and Knit the Classics.
2. Why, or why not? I like the idea of reading and talking about a book with other people — like-minded or not, as it may be.  My senior project class was on Mark Twain, and we read a great number of his books and discussed them excitedly, passionately, late into the night, and still managed to leave a lot to be said.  Great fun.  Why I haven’t joined a book group is mostly due to time, that reading on a fairly strict timetable is still difficult for me, both because I don’t like being rushed and because I have a lot of distractions.  (I also have a nagging reluctance to read books that I have little or no interest in.  Yes, there are many wonderful books out there that I would not have ordinarily given a second look.  But there are many that I am interested in and I haven’t read yet.  I might find that vowing to overcome my bias against "the uninteresting choice of the month" is finally what does get me to join a reading club!
3. If you are in a book club, or were once, what did you like about it?
4. What did you dislike about the book club?

(Funny, what I have reservations about with knitalongs — making the same thing as everybody else — is actually what I would like about reading clubs — reading the same thing, and talking about it, finding out what other people see in a work, perhaps different from my reading and perhaps not, deepening and enriching the reading experience for everyone.  That said, it is often very interesting to see the different ways that people can make a Clapotis….)