One-Book Book Club
While I have zero desire to read and then re-read Proust, I thought the idea of this book club focusing on one book (depth instead of breadth) fascinating. Thank you, Strong Sense of Place, for writing about this.
There are definitely books I re-read and gain new insights from each time I read them, but adding in the discussion element — continuously being exposed to everyone else’s growth and change and pouring that into a single book — and then being able to refer back to past discussions would be amazing.
I’m mildly interested in seeing the documentary about the 17-year-old book club mentioned in the article, but I’m more interested in which books could stand up to this kind of depth. There are plenty of book clubs built around a canon — Agatha Christie, for example — but few that are built around re-reading a single book.
I think it could work with Handmaid’s Tale, especially if you bring in current events. What other books could you see turning into a one-book book club?
2 comments
Hmm… maybe something deep and multi-layered…
One hundred years of solitude.
Master and Margarita.
War and Peace
There are some books and can be read, and re-read, and re-re-read, and you see something different every time.
That said, I think I would get pretty sick of rehashing the same book all the time…
Hmmm… I’m with Natka… I think you’d need something fairly lengthy & dense, in order to keep things fresh. I was thinking maybe “Middlemarch” — it was one of my prof’s favourite books — he had a copy underlined & with notes in different colours for different times he’d taught the book!
I am in a couple of book clubs/groups that only read the works of one author: L.M. Montgomery, and D.E. Stevenson (as you’ll know if you read the book reviews on my blog! lol) Both groups go through each book chapter by chapter, and there are some pretty rich discussions. I’ve been in the DES group for 8 years, and we have yet to repeat a book since I’ve been around. The group has been going for almost 25 years and has read all of Stevenson’s novels at least once (she wrote more than 40), with the exception of one that’s never been covered. One of the members has an amazing database/spreadsheet related to all things DES and has tracked what books we’ve read when.