Culturebox: Book Clubs

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assessment Book Clubs Why do we love them so much? Is it the zucchini bread? By Nathan Heller Posted Friday, July 29, 2011, at 10:54 AM ET A casual observer of the book-club scene could be fooled into thinking that this summer was a hard one for the nation's leisure readers. Late in spring, Oprah's club shuttered, stranding publishers in what promises to be a long shoal of short print runs and offering the rest of us one literary arbiter fewer to love or hate. Borders, which ran a sort of book group of its own, shut down stores, too, after creditors refused a buyout offer from a book-club mega-company. Could reading groups be losing their sway in our culture? On one hand, this is a reasonable question; on the other, it's like asking whether the United States should worry about being out-powered by Belgium. More than 5 million adults are thought to be in reading groups, not counting online clubs, and a number of those adults have a noticeable missionary bent: If Oprah didn't get you onboard, there's a good chance that your neighbor with a Thursday group will have you marking up Love in the Time of Cholera before summer is through. To point out that a good part of this country attends book clubs is not necessarily to establish that America is crazy about books. Like scheduling a business lunch or following a date upstairs for coffee, book-clubbing is fraught with ulterior motives. For one thing, there is usually dessert. The Book Club Cookbook recommends discussing Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-winning novel in the company of three good-sized cocoa-cinnamon babkas. Some clubs look like offerings to the gods of hyperglycemia, their altars laden with warm brownies, sweet zucchini bread, homemade cupcakes, and--just as inevitably--a gross of Oreos dumped on a paper plate by someone who has long since fled the scene. (This packaged-food stealth bomber is the Boo Radley of book clubs, cropping up when all eyes are averted to deposit curious wares: Once, at a club I visited, someone had planted a large, gaping carton of KFC in the middle of a food spread, where it stood untouched through the discussion like some occult talisman.) Alcohol tends to be on offer, which is another way of saying that book-clubbing is not something to undergo with people you find deeply boorish. Or, also, people you like too much: Parents of small children have been known to linger long after the coffee goes cold, running up their sitters' clocks to chase an extra, guilty hour of unencumbered social time. For a pursuit decked out in the stiff raiment of virtue, clubbing is extraordinarily enabling of vice. To continue reading, click here. Nathan Heller is a Slate copy editor. He also writes the magazine's "Assessment" column. Follow him on Twitter. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate How Boehner Is Using the Balanced-Budget Amendment To Save His Debt Plan Is It Really Possible To Die From "Alcohol Withdrawal"? Apple Is Destroying the Nintendo 3DS the Same Way Nintendo Destroyed PlayStation 3	Advertisement
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