Book Club Experience

This experience is best described as an emergency book club. We are scattered across the globe and not all of us are well-acquainted, but when Emily Wilson’s translation of ‘The Odyssey’ came out, we were all having lively but disparate conversations across several social media platforms until two of the most networked mutual friends decided to invite us to a Facebook group where we could all meet and discuss things in a more organized way. One of them I have known for many years; she has organized friend-groups very successfully before (knitting, amateur fencing, protest marching, bridesmaid activities) and is an excellent host so I accepted her invitation immediately even though I knew a decided minority of the other members and the idea of a formal online book club was initially not appealing.

We had considered using Facebook as a touchstone and moving to a video group chat but meeting hours would be difficult since we are so scattered and busy, and when we did explore the Facebook group (though few of us enjoy the platform itself) we found that the asynchronous nature of the communication allowed us to have multiple ongoing conversations without overlapping or infringing on the current week’s reading. There have been a number of yes-or-no questions; they usually begin with “does anyone else…?” and it invites people to contribute further.

The two admins/leaders of the group are the ones who brought us all together, but they prefer facilitation to overt leadership—a majority vote decided our pace (slow through the intro, then a chapter a week) and tone (informal), while all the weekly topics remain open because one of our favorite things to do is to “go down the rabbit hole” and talk about how our research/work/soapbox ties into what we’re reading. 

One of the admins has set up automated posts of the chapter and verse of what the week’s reading is but there are no formal group questions; one member loves art history so she often posts links to relevant images or archaeological finds; another of us loves pop culture and gender studies and he posts a lot of JSTOR article citations and Tumblr posts. Others are unfamiliar with the nature of translation and none of us know Greek so comparing translations has become a topic of conversation. We usually all try to bring something to the discussion and start a comment thread but sometimes we get interested in a single thread and follow it together. Not everyone participates in every discussion, but usually a large percentage of them (out of a dozen or so) participate in the nonverbal aspects (likes, hearts, emoji, un-captioned reaction gifs). I can’t think of an instance where someone “stole the spotlight”; two of the members respond early because the automated posts pop up during their morning while the rest of us are asleep and one member has a lot to share, but the asynchronous nature of the group makes it difficult to demand attention for a certain interaction/post.

The atmosphere of the discussion is mostly positive; there are some topics (origins of PTSD and the experience of Achilles; Wilson’s discussion of gendered pronouns in Greek) that elicit some strong feelings of frustration or even anger but we try to be supportive of each other even when we don’t agree; this group of people is made up of very different demographics of age, race, creed, and nationality but we do agree that we value curiosity, love of our work, and love of sharing our work. 

Our respective to-be-read stacks vary widely but we have found some interesting cross-over that has brought up some fun discussions in the comments. Some of them have been in book groups with each other before never all of us together—however, we already discussed several future choices after we’ve finished this book.