Addressing the complaint that her writing wasn’t uplifting enough, Flannery O’Connor once quipped, “One old lady who wants her heart lifted up wouldn’t be so bad, but you multiply her 250,000 times and what you get is a book club.” She did not mean this as a compliment.
For most of my life, I would have taken O’Connor’s side in this (as I would in most arguments). Even apart from the least-common-denominator “book of the month” clubs she implied, the term book club often connotes a grown-up version of middle school kids trying to start an oral class report on Moby-Dick with “Herman Melville was a very, very important man.”
That all changed for me about five years ago, when I joined a book club that changed my life.
I was reluctant to do it because the last thing I wanted was another Zoom meeting in my schedule. But being present on those Wednesday nights has become one of the most important ways I have survived the tumultuous last several years.
At some point, I noticed that what was most important about this book club was not the intellectual conversations about books. As time has gone on, it takes us longer and longer to get to whatever book we’re discussing that week. Instead, we talk about what’s really happening with us—who’s thinking about changing jobs, who’s worried about a son or daughter, whose elderly parent is falling more these days, whose friend is grappling with depression.
Over time, one member and then another, and then two others, grew ill with cancer. Two of them went through treatment and are doing well. Two of them—Tim Keller and Michael Gerson—died. Almost all of them logged in to the book club from their hospital rooms to talk about Dallas Willard and Alexis de Tocqueville, while what we were all really learning from one another was how to die well.
We seemed to know that in days filled with medical charts and blood levels, there was something healing for them—for all of us—to talk about Abraham Kuyper or Jacques Ellul. And the subtext of all those conversations, even for this group of bookish, cerebral men, was saying, “We love you, we’re with you, and you’re not alone” to the one in the hospital room.
One day, I said to my wife, “The secret of all this is that it’s not really a book club; the books are the excuse we give ourselves to make sure we’re all there.” In that sense, the reason I keep coming back is akin to the lonely man whom songwriter Don Williams talks about, the one who insists about his neighborhood bar, “I just come here for the music.”
Political scientist Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone, a study of the American loss of community, told The New York Times this year that his lament for the loss of bowling clubs is sometimes misunderstood. We need those kinds of mediating institutions—outside the family and outside the state—in order to build civil society, he said, but “you don’t bowl so you can build a better community, you bowl because it’s fun.”
“And in the doing of the bowling, in a team, you’re hanging out with folks and sometimes you’re talking about the latest TV show, or occasionally you might talk about the garbage pickup in town. And that’s democracy.” In other words, we come to community not by setting out to “commune” but by coming at it sideways.
C. S. Lewis described the love of friendship itself as dependent on that kind of dynamic. Friendship, he said, is not mere companionship—doing the same thing together—but it starts out that way: “Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice.” Or books. He continued,
The Companionship was between people who were doing something together—hunting, studying, painting or what you will. The Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared and less easily defined; still hunters, but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take account of; still travelling companions, but on a different kind of journey. Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.
One doesn’t apply somewhere to find friends—the way one might find a date on an app or a job on the internet. Often, we have to have something we love in common to keep us coming back, to keep us from withdrawing into ourselves. For my group, it was books. And maybe for us, that was the best way to do it.
Reading, after all, is a solitary activity. It’s hard to read in community. One has to ponder, to think. As a matter of fact, scholars tell us that literacy is what led to the concept of individuality, which has led civilization to great good—human rights and dignity, democracy, scientific research that has saved billions of lives. But it’s also brought loneliness and isolation.
And yet even reading—one of the most individual of acts—can be used to gather people together, to talk, to discuss, to realize the sort of exclamation that Lewis described as the fundamental core of friendship: “You too? I thought I was the only one.”
A book club is not for everybody. For some people, it’s building barns or sitting in a deer stand or, yes, bowling. But when—in any of those circumstances—one finds a genuine circle of friends who trust each other, who aren’t afraid to lose face in front of or be vulnerable with each other, what’s gained is immeasurable.
I suppose I realized this when, one night after book club, I realized I had to update my funeral plans, tucked away in the “just in case” file for my wife.
A lot of the people I had written down to give eulogies or pray prayers no longer speak to me—mostly over our differing views on politics. I noticed that the people I wanted to be sure were there included the men I gather with on Wednesday nights to talk about books. Twice before, we’ve gathered at a funeral for one of us, and it comforts me to know they might gather at mine.
Being a reader is not just about the mind. It’s not even just about the heart. Sometimes, a reader multiplied by 12 or 13 is a book club. Unlike Flannery O’Connor, I mean that as a very good thing.
Russell Moore is editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology project.
Onward: A column by Russell Moore
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