Reading Together testifies to the contemplative mode that both books and book clubs can spark.
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska’s Reading Together is a book about book clubs and, quite fittingly, reads like a member of your book club talking at some length. Described variously as a memoir, a book, a treatise and a tribute, Reading Together eludes genres. While composed of many vignettes that detail personal experiences alongside many footnotes that delineate Bartoszyńska’s scholarly underpinnings, primarily, Reading Together wonders about reading. Published by a small press focused on book culture called Ode Books, it joins a genre of books that catalog their authors’ reading experiences, like Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia. As such, it straddles the line between a scholarly book—after all, Bartoszyńska is an English professor who struggles, she tells us, to turn off her training—and a reflective essay of creative nonfiction (it comes in at just 85 pages). Reading Together ultimately models the exploratory mode that, in my view, the book club practices.
Bartoszyńska tells her readers that she wants to “think through…the kind of knowledge,” “whatever kind of knowledge” that book clubs produce. She argues “that book clubs can produce a unique form of reading, a different kind of attention” and advocates for “the benefits of a kind of reading.” As I read, I kept asking, what kind of knowledge? How is the reading unique or the attention different? What benefits do you see? As I awaited Bartoszyńska’s argument, I slowly realized there is none, and indeed, she cautions her reader against such instrumental forms of reading. Rather, Reading Together wanders in and out of ideas and memories, analyzing Confessions of the Fox and then recalling Bartoszyńska’s move to Boise as a fourth-grader, returning to insecurities about her own expertise, and then reflecting on her time leading a book club in a men’s prison. The text circles around claims rather than settling on them, opening up possibilities and letting them linger. It muses on questions like why read fiction at all, resisting the oft-mentioned angle that reading magically produces empathy and unpacking the trend that fiction must represent its reader. Rambling around in ideas, almost rummaging through them, Reading Together testifies to the contemplative mode that both books and book clubs can spark.
And yet, in spite of the collective meandering through thought that it celebrates, Reading Together reads a bit like a monologue. The text would have benefitted from a more dialogic approach, one that engages the extant, enriching conversations on book clubs, scholarly and otherwise. It struck me as odd that Bartoszyńska readily announces in her book reflecting on book clubs that “I don’t know the actual history of book clubs.” And yet this history importantly centers the book club as a potentially radical space for women to lay claim to knowledge when institutions and so-called polite society inhibited their participation. Inone famous example, several women journalists formed a literary society named Sorosis after they were excluded from an event for Charles Dickens. The origins of the American book club predate the United States itself, developing from such predecessors as Anne Hutchinson’s group Bible studies, first hosted on a ship crossing the Atlantic, Hannah Adams’s female reading society, which began about a century later not far from Hutchinson’s initial destination in Massachusetts, the lyceums popular among transcendentalists and abolitionists and so on, up until Oprah Winfrey propels the book club into a new tier of popularity in 1966 with her televised group. Book clubs have incubated radical social movements, including women’s suffrage and civil rights efforts, creating space for those who had been intentionally marginalized to organize and educate themselves. Bartoszyńska briefly references the Combahee River Collective as an exemplar, but her claims about book clubs providing a “unique” type of knowledge would be deepened if she had integrated any of the Collective’s forebears, including the Society of Young Ladies, formed a few towns over in Lynn, MA in 1827. A brief gloss of this history could have given her reader a better picture of the role the book club has played in creating and curating knowledge outside of the academy, a mission to which she herself seems committed.
Instead, Bartoszyńska calls the book club an “unexplored” scholarly topic and moves on, when she could have seized the chance to share with her reader—presumably someone interested in book culture—some of the considerable existing research on book clubs. Given the many footnotes in the text, Bartoszyńska is clearly open to integrating scholarship into her writing. And scholars like Elizabeth Long, Christy Craig, Janice Radway, Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Simone Murray, Emily Kroeker, Deniz Ozgan, and Ọlájídé Michael Salawu provide a diverse range of insights into the book club as an economic, political, and cultural engine that implicate gender, sexuality, class, nationhood, the internet, commerce, and decolonization. Parsing the work of other voices on the subject of book clubs, specifically, would have made the text more of a conversation and less of a monologue, replicating the conversational form of knowledge production she uplifts. It also would have strengthened her own claims, especially as other voices may have helped her solidify what, precisely, the book club does (and does not!) achieve.
As it stood, there were several ideas in Reading Together that never solidified. Even though Bartoszyńska embraces ‘uncritical reading,’ she never settles on a definition of the term, leaving us unclear as to what this practice would look like. It seems she wants to counter both the popular idea that ‘no one knows how to read anymore’ and the prestige placed on the rigorous training in literary studies that we see in academic spaces. However, it strikes me that the dichotomy between her approach and that of her various book clubs might be less stark than imagined; her fellow book club attendees’ contributions seem plenty insightful and analogous to her own comments. Lacking a definition, this term risks devaluing non-scholarly attendees and perhaps even the book club itself as bereft of critical thinking. I suspect this is not her point; I suspect instead that she is struggling against her own inclination to always perform literary criticism. At one point, she describes operating in the classroom as a tour guide, versus in the bookclub as a tourist (a vivid analogy!), but a later anecdote reveals that she has trouble ceding tour guide status: when her prison book club discussed Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, she “tenaciously refused to let any of their critical readings rest, insisting, ‘No it doesn’t just say that. Look.’” Such an example embodies Bartoszyńska’s confession, and concern, that she struggles to let go of the teacherly, scholarly part of her experience with literature. Perhaps as a consequence of this tension, her book dances between theorizing the book club and thinking aloud as if she were at a book club; the result is a rather contradictory reading experience. For example, she helpfully resists vague gestures toward books as “empathy machine[s]” but, in doing so, offers her own vague gesture—that books are always touted as tools for improvement, never as inciting degeneration—which misses a long history of skepticism about the novel’s moral value (consider the debates surrounding Ulysses, Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, The Satanic Verses, even Harry Potter and so on). Such a sweeping statement showcases that Reading Together is comfortable exercising an exploratory discourse—in honor of the book club!—but it is also unable to resolve its ambivalence about the importance of critique as a cultivated skill.
Some of the strongest moments emerge when Bartoszyńska concretely identifies the particular opportunities of the book club—its openness to, even dependence on, digressions, in contrast to a standard literature classroom. “There is space to indulge an anecdote or sudden association,” she writes. Yes, indulgent—the book club says let us indulge in books we decide we want to read; let us indulge in energetic, enlivening conversations that encompass our workdays and our families and the TV shows we’re watching alongside the text of choice; let us indulge in strong reactions; let us indulge in our communities and the communal reading mode we create together; let us indulge in our snacks; let us indulge in our wine (and perhaps even in the stereotype of feminized readership that accompanies such indulgences). Similarly, I appreciated when Bartoszyńska invokes the intimacy of a book club—when she notes that the book club is “obviously” a shared experience, she gives us a pocket of insight into the routes toward meaning that it enables. Life is composed of many shared experiences—think of standing in line at a coffee shop—but they do not invite the same degree of intimacy or investment in meaning-making as a book club. In such moments, Reading Together usefully legitimizes the book club as a space that engenders meaningful literary encounters, as well as the notion that reading can be a site of pleasure in addition to analysis.
For teaching, “there’s always an agenda,” and we might expect the same of nonfiction writing—but in Reading Together, there is no agenda. Such a resolutely speculative mode implies the value of curating knowledge that asks, rather than asserts, that shares, rather than possesses, that wonders, rather than dictates—as the best book club would do. Bartoszyńska writes that the elite university, despite or maybe because of its commitment to interrogative practices, invites and often demands “a rare and beautiful” dedication to ideas. But the book club suggests that such a passion need not be so rare, that it might happen on the regular outside of such ivory towers, in cozy living rooms or crowded restaurants or even, like some of mine, over Zoom. But it remains a beautiful—indulgent!—experience to inhabit a room, a book, a community, an encounter together. Integrating the histories of the book club would not only have better informed this study but also may have expanded its implications. If, as these sources suggest, the book club can create space outside of powerful institutions to read and learn and think together, then it has the potential to democratize these indulgences and, perhaps, to foment political awakenings and even political action.
Maggie Boyd earned her PhD in English Literature at Boston University in 2024 and now works as Assistant Director for Writing Support at BU. Her research focuses on contemporary representations of healing. She has perfected her Dunkin order and the art of the baked potato.
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