One of the things that my reading friends find most surprising is my confession that – up until very recently – I’ve never belonged to a book club.  The closest I got to a book club-type environment was in college, junior year, when I volunteered to lead a freshman book discussion group as part of a pilot program that my university was rolling out with the idea of having every freshman participate in a class-wide reading event.  The book was going to be provided to each freshman as part of their admissions package, and I didn’t see why they should get a free book and I didn’t, so I signed up as a discussion leader.  The joke was on me, because the book was Guns, Germs and Steel, and I spent the better part of my summer slogging through it.  The only fun I had with that book came when I brought it on vacation and my friend Adam attacked the “Speedboat to Polynesia” chapter with a red pen, crossing out the word “speedboat” everywhere he saw it and writing in “jetski” instead.  But I digress.

Anyway, I’ve never been in a real book club – one that meets regularly, drinks wine and dissects popular fiction and nonfiction titles.  My mom is, and her book club has been going strong for more than seven years now.  Those ladies have it figured out.  Sometimes I pass them a recommendation through my mom and wait eagerly to hear whether they liked my choice or not (generally, they do).  But I’m not local to the area, so I’m not in the club – alas.  I’ve considered asking if I could join from afar and participate by FaceTime, and I bet they’d let me.  But it just wouldn’t be quite the same.

So as you can see, I’m not opposed to the idea of a book club.  I love the idea of a book club.  But it never seemed to be an option for me.  I didn’t know how to find one, and the introvert in me didn’t particularly want to start one – nor did I know how to go about recruiting members – or to be in charge of things like setting rules and expectations, admitting (or not admitting) new members, or anything else that might make me unpopular.  So I participated in online readalongs when I could and dreamed of a book club falling, fully formed, into my lap.  They’d be wine-drinkers and classics-readers.  We’d sip rosé and debate things like “Henry Tilney: mansplainer or not?”  This was never going to happen.

Then along came the Buy Nothing Project.  For those not in the know, BN is a national network of hyper-local neighborhood gifting economies.  It’s generally managed through Facebook, and in order to get into your local group you have to prove that you live in the neighborhood.  Without getting too deep in irrelevant details, it’s basically a gift exchange where people give and receive gifts – of time, goods, instruction.  Some people do more giving (seeing the group as a way to purge and declutter), and others do more receiving.  There is a very defined set of rules for how gifting is supposed to work, and a pretty particularized culture that grows up around the gifting economy.  I was a little nervous about getting involved, but I wanted to unload baby gear and a number of other things, and I liked the idea of giving to – and hopefully getting to know – my neighbors.  We had just moved back to the DC area after three years of feeling very isolated in western New York, and I was craving a community – and that’s what I found.  My first “Buy Nothing friend” was a woman named Allison.  I gave her a set of bookends and we were fast friends after that – we took long neighborhood walks while she was pregnant, she accompanied me to a friend’s jewelry trunk sale, and we enjoyed many sessions of tea, banana bread and marathon chats.  I delivered four large boxes of toddler girl clothing to her after her daughter was born.  She loaned me her expertise as an educator when I needed to bounce school-related frustrations off of someone, and she picked up and held mail for me when our family went out of town unexpectedly.  She’s a terrific neighbor and an even better friend.

What does this have to do with book club?  Okay – I’m going on and on about Buy Nothing.  But you see, it’s inextricably bound up in our neighborhood book club.  One day I logged into Facebook and navigated over to the BN page for my neighborhood to post a gift.  Longtime readers may remember that I used to have a subscription to Book Riot Quarterly boxes: one month, I somehow received a duplicate box and that box had moved with me twice now.  It was time for it to go.  So, I posted it.  BN encourages participants to have a little fun with choosing to whom they will gift an item, so I asked interested neighbors to tell me their favorite book – and the responses poured in.  In the end, I chose a woman who said her favorite book was The Master and Margarita, which is a book I also love – but I had never met anyone who shared my appreciation for it.  (I only know one other person who has read it, and she disliked it.)  After I chose my gift recipient, I made the offhand remark that there were so many readers in the group, we should start a book club.

The idea took off immediately, and the Buy Nothing book club was born.

We met for the first time back in April.  I hosted the meeting, which was a get-to-know-you meeting.  We gathered on my couch, sipped wine (just like in my dreams!) and talked about our families, our jobs, our other interests, and our reading lives.  We agreed on certain parameters for the group – we’d rotate hosting, the host would choose the book that we’d be discussing at her meeting, and we’d try to stick to books that were older so that people could get them at the library easily, or at least obtain an inexpensive paperback – since forcing people to buy a $27 hardcover each month in order to be part of the book club went pretty directly opposite our gifting economy ethos.  (The library system in our town is wonderful, but we’re a city of hardcore readers and any popular new title is guaranteed to have a waiting list no matter how many copies the library orders.)

The book club took off immediately.  I hosted the second meeting as well, and we discussed Northanger Abbey.  (The club mostly hated it.  I cried into my wine a little bit.)  We spun out into a separate Facebook group after our group chat became too popular and unwieldy for me to manage.  Little traditions started to emerge.  One woman brought rice krispie treats to every meeting – now we all look forward to them.  Someone always has a gift to exchange.  One member brought a “Pete the Cat” puzzle for my kids; another loaned me some mason jars (which I need to return – oops).  I handed off two big bags of toddler boy clothes at the third meeting.

This is not to say we haven’t had our hiccups.  We’re a new club, still getting our feet under us as a unit and getting to know each other as individuals.  Our preference for inclusivity has led to something of a revolving door of new members who come and go while the core of the group stays relatively stable.  We’re still figuring out our system for choosing books – we’ve had one book that needed two meetings, because it was so long, and a couple of new releases that violated our self-imposed rule against $27 hardcovers.  (Including this month’s pick, Educated, by Tara Westover – a 2018 release.  It’s excellent and I know our discussion is going to be really rich – I’m especially interested to hear what the other girls have to say about unreliable memory – but we’ve had to scramble to make sure no one had to purchase a copy if they didn’t want to do so.)  We also have a hard time staying on topic and the conversation often veers away from the book and on to neighborhood issues, the BN community, decluttering and parenting talk – shared areas of interest for many of us, but not what we are meeting to discuss.  (I often am the one struggling to keep the group on subject.  My mom mentioned that her book club has a rule that they eat first and talk about whatever they want to discuss while they eat, but once the food is put away they only discuss the book.  I may propose that to my group, but I don’t want to seem dictatorial.)

Which brings me to wonder: how on earth am I in this position?  Yes, I’ve wanted to join a book club for years – but as an introvert (and one who is generally retiring with people I don’t know well and especially in groups) I wanted to slip into a fully formed book club, spend a few meetings just listening, and not be in charge of anything, ever.  My working life requires me to counsel managers through personnel matters on almost a daily basis, and while I love what I do, I didn’t want to boss my book club.  I wanted to ring the doorbell with a book and a bottle of wine in my hand, curl up on someone’s couch, and let other people run the show.  So that’s what I’m allowing myself to do now, and it’s nice to cede control.  When it’s my month to host, I try to keep the group focused, but otherwise I am content to sit and enjoy my neighbors’ company.  Sometimes we veer off subject – okay, we always veer off subject – but I couldn’t find a better community.

Are you a member of a book club?  How do you keep them on subject?  (Asking for a friend.)