Book club and community

It was my other book club yesterday.  I call it my other book club because it’s the second one I’ve set up, and I think of the first book club as my actual book club.

We meet in a local library, a slightly shabby but beautiful Art Deco building which is circular and was recently listed.  We sit in a little room to one side of the main atrium where the books are.  There are four sofas set in a square, with a coffee table in the middle, and to one side a staff kitchen which we’re allowed to use to make drinks.  The room leads into a small theatre, which is occasionally used for community productions.  All the rooms are labelled with beautiful wooden lettering – the room we’re in is Dressing Room. 

We meet at lunch time, and bring sandwiches which we eat before we have our discussion.  It’s a Friday lunch time, so only retired people or those who don’t work on Fridays attend.  I normally have Fridays off, and the other members who work also have flexible hours.  One is a mother of young children, but the other members are 50 or over.  We’re all women.

We always have books from the library’s book club list, which means they have always been published in the last couple of years, so haven’t had time to become classics.  The book club is named after the local church many of the members attend, but in spite of this I’ve been interested to note that several of the books we’ve read have featured lust and violence – more so than my other book club which isn’t named after a church, but after the road where all the members but one live. 

This month we had read The Casual Vacancy, by J. K.Rowling.  The book contains graphic descriptions of life in a disadvantaged community. We all felt that it was too harsh in its depiction of unpleasant characters.  One member felt that she had never met people as unpleasant as those in the book.  Others felt the book was realistic.  We all agreed that the story was well told, but that we didn’t like it and found it very bleak.  We discussed community, and F said that she didn’t think there were real communities any more in this country, not communities where if someone died, everyone else in the community was upset.  However, E said that the village where she lives does have many community activities, and there was a group of people who organised all sorts of events, people she knew she could go to if she wanted to know ‘the latest gossip’.

I thought about how I don’t necessarily know all the people who live in my suburb of this city, but I do belong to a number of communities.  They may not be traditional village communities, but the suburb is one, and the two book clubs are two more, and my church is another, and my colleagues are yet another.   They are all somewhere I belong, and within them there are people who look after each other, and rejoice and mourn with each other through the vicissitudes of life.  So even though it’s our habit to lament the loss of community in our modern, busy urban lives, maybe we can see that it still exists where there are people who join together to talk and create and care for each other.