Hello Antilibrarians, happy Sunday :)
I want to share one reading practice I've found to be a lot of fun: couples book club AKA reading big books together with a loved one.
On the Antilibraries forum, we've talked about reading really big books. And we've jammed on ideas for experimental book clubs, where I mentioned the two-person book club. Let's explore how this most intimate of reading groups can work.
A few years back, my wife Jinjin and I started a tradition of reading big, long, classic books together. We haven't done this quite every year, but have gotten through several wonderful doorstops:
- Moby Dick: incredible, lives up to the hype; can be slow going, but gripping throughout, from majestic prose to whaling minutiae; ignore the haters who complain about the detailed digressions and meandering meditations, those parts are great too
- Don Quixote: perhaps the OG of novels, and surprisingly hilarious; an almost unending series of vignettes; stories inside of stories, epic hijinks and more
- The Power Broker: an amazing biography; a sweeping history the ramifications of which unfurl across decades; yeah it's long but have you seen Caro's other mega-project?!
- Infinite Jest: wild and dense and imaginative; this one took a loooong time to get into, like a month to read the first hundred pages and a week to read the final third; it's virtuosic and full of footnotes and once you get into it ultimately pretty great
We have actually traditionally picked a book and started reading on Valentine's Day, but that's not the important part here! I think it could also work nicely as a general new year practice / annual challenge, and of course you can do this with any friend, sibling, parent, etc.
How it works:
- Pick a book together, ideally one that's long, that you expect will be fun yet challenging
- Start at the same time; try to keep roughly the same pace
- Talk about it as you go; push each other to finish
Why it works:
- Ritualizes your commitment; gets you more invested
- More fun to read something challenging when you have someone to talk to!
- But also more casual than a formal book club; easy to take your time and adjust pacing etc. as you go
- It can be nice to read something slowly; this kind of book becomes a background part of your life that may filter how you see the world for a while, in interesting ways
I've found this practice can be valuable even if you don't finish.
I actually started a similar thing with my sister — we realized we both had copies of Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, and decided to start reading together. We talked about the first few chapters, but I ended up going through relatively quickly and finishing before she got into it.
Similarly, one year Jinjin and I picked Bleak House, and she got all the way through while I stalled out like 10 or 15% in and never returned. It happens! We can count it a win if at least one of us gets through a challenging book we wouldn't have read otherwise…or even just get far enough in to decide it's not for you, and put aside.
So…what should we read this year? A few ideas:
- I want to finally read some Jane Austen, maybe Pride and Prejudice
- John McPhee's Annals of the Former World has been on my shelf for quite a while!
- Likewise, my Library of America edition of James Baldwin's collected nonfiction
- The Gormenghast Novels seem great; I think a really good trilogy or longer series could work well for this
- Middlemarch, perhaps?
Have you done anything like this? Have suggestions that would be great picks for a two-person book club? Would love to hear any — share ideas here!
Brendan