by Charlotte Phillips (Tue Jan 19, 2010)
Pssst....wanna
join a book club? Address? No problem. Just look for the house with the horse's
head on the doorstep and the copy of ‘Anna Karenina' stuffed in its mouth.
Why the horse?
Sister, it's a long story. Well, a short, long story. More like a novella,
really. I knew it would review well.
I started a
book club when it became clear that I was temperamentally unsuited to any of
the existing ones. Naively,
I'd assumed that book clubs were for people who enjoyed reading and discussing
literature. But while it was true that wit, erudition and humour were there
a-plenty, they just weren't ever directed at the book.
Instead,
the women would slip into something more comfortable - usually a mental state
bordering on catatonia - and discuss their children's brilliance, the pros and
cons of reading schemes and home makeover ideas.
Worse were
the catering-focused book clubs where the hostess would be required to produce
anything from canapés to three course meals of startling brilliance and
originality that would outdo the previous month's efforts. One group
was even rumoured to demand a lavish buffet themed to the book. Fine if you
chose Winnie the Pooh (honey sandwiches); less so if the volume of the month
was, say, ‘I Claudius' (lambs' brains, dormice, piglets stuffed with live
thrushes, followed by marriage to the horse of your choice).
My book
club, I decided, would be supremely different.
First,
it would be a canapé-free zone. Crisps were allowed, though anything that took
us the wrong side of balsamic vinegar, sea salt, cracked pepper and the word
‘kettle' in any context other than that of teabags, would be immediately
confiscated and detonated in a controlled explosion in the back garden.
Alcohol,
on the other hand, was welcomed. Above all, everyone who joined was required to have attempted the book and have
a view about it, no matter how sketchy or bigoted.
You'd have
thought I'd broken some cardinal rule of femininity.
I
approached women I knew well, women I knew slightly and - born of increasing
desperation - women I didn't know at all but who seemed to be studying their
shopping lists in what looked to be an analytical fashion. They'd back
away as if I'd suggested livening up coffee mornings with a live animal
sacrifice and a ‘draw the best pentagram and win sex with the devil,'
competition.
If they
didn't back away, holding a crucifix, they had reading issues faddier than any
dietary craze. One was biography intolerant. One went into anaphylactic shock
if she read anything sad. Another could digest only world literature.
I became
desperate, tracking hot prospects like a sniffer dog on the trail of some
particularly seductive cocaine. It led to
the odd mix-up, like the time I approached one woman only to discover that the
book I had overheard her discussing with such intensity was, in fact the Bible,
which was the only book she ever read.
By this
point I was suffering severe alphabet overload. So I broke the second cardinal
book club rule (the first being, obviously, ‘don't ever read the book') and
started poaching people from other book clubs. I offered them liberation from
enforced catering and gossip about parent association rows, and the chance to
exercise their brains.
And now I have
a book club with a membership of more than one. It comes at a price. All the
other book clubs hate me. Hence the horse's head on the front porch.
