First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

What is it about reading groups? Never done anything to hurt anyone, but still a regular target for insult. Columnists sneer at an imagined coffee klatsch of middle-aged women, while authors veer between gratitude and suspicion. Earlier this year, Zadie Smith described the reading group as the enemy of the individual reader, a delivery mechanism for a conformist culture of ’system reading’.

Contrary evidence doesn’t seem to dent the prejudice. A study by Jenny Hartley showed that reading groups vary enormously in make-up, reading habits and method. In a recent article updating her findings, she reported that nearly half of all groups in the UK are now mixed, not women-only, and their choices are highly unpredictable – some three-quarters of all books chosen by groups in her survey were read by only one group.

On the plus side, fans cite reading groups as proof of a flourishing literary culture, like the festivals name-checked by Gordon Brown. But they might also be a sign of failure: a cultish effort to seek out small numbers of like-minded people, in an otherwise uninterested environment. It is certainly a sign of fragmentation: with so many different titles out there, how else can one find a group of people who have all read the same thing?

Of course I am biased. I started a reading group 10 years ago, before they became fashionable. The group, drawn from readers of Prospect, is still going strong. Why did I start it? Because I read a lot, and enjoy discussing what I am reading with other people. The views of others bring fresh insights, and the effort of communicating makes me distill my own thinking. Why has it continued? Because other people feel the same way. Why do I bother to counter these attacks? Because the activity they are describing is unrecognisable.

In a reading group, we remain individual readers. We read on our own, and bring our thoughts to the discussion. It seems odd to assume that discussion equals conformity. There is some collectivity, which is not the same thing: we have certainly developed a collective memory, saved for posterity in monthly email reports. I hope eventually to put all 10 years of our reports in the public domain, to see if others find them interesting. An outside observer may even be able to find an implicit ’system’ in our response, though I would say our group has resisted any totalising theories.

If there is anything that unifies our response, it is not critical theory but a form of poetics. Our group includes several writers and editors who are interested in how literature is made, from the maker’s point of view. One suspects that a more general audience is interested in this too, hence the success of commentaries like John Mullan’s Guardian book club series. But this only works when the audience is taken seriously. John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel, for example, makes a cynical (mis)calculation that it can get away with sheer waffle, because it is not for a ‘professional’ audience. Zadie Smith herself, who is including her essays on writing in a forthcoming collection, will find an enthusiastic market among reading group members – or may do so, if she can cut out the insults.

What does ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ mean in this context? As a professional wordsmith I believe there is a distinction, but also notice an interesting trend. In the Web 2.0 world of user-generated content, the task of selecting and evaluating content simply moves downwards, from supposedly elitist gatekeepers to the ordinary punter. In response, the ordinary punter has started to train for the task, and become a little more professional. Hence the interest in university writing courses and degrees in vocational media subjects. Hence also the move in our reading group from vague talk of what people ‘like’ (or not), to more disciplined discussions about the choices writers make. In other words, we are looking at the work, not just through it, as Richard Lanham puts it in The Attention Economy.

Prospect has not yet made too much of its offline community of readers: this blog site is a start. From the end of August, I shall be posting regular notes about our discussions. At the next meeting, we will be looking at Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, reportedly based on Bloom. I hope to see you here again.

Read about the Bloom discussion here

Read the October discussion here, on Measuring the World