Going book-clubbing

A column by Sarah Murphy

The Journal & Press continues to salute its columnists this week.

The Greenwich Free Library director, Sarah Murphy is not only, perhaps, our region’s most avid reader, she’s also a wonderful columnist as well.

Murphy and her husband moved to our region from New York City some time during the pandemic, and the local library has been growing and vibrant ever since.

Here’s a fun piece she did for The Journal & Press earlier this year.

Going book-clubbing

By Sarah Murphy
Special to Journal & Press

At around four in the morning, on the party bus from the villa back to the city, I got invited to join a book club. It was May of 2015, and I was spending three days in Seville, Spain, to celebrate the wedding of an old friend. It was a long way to travel, especially for a weekend, but I managed to get a cheap flight, and I am loathe to pass up a chance to explore a new city. I was traveling solo, and despite knowing the groom since high school, I knew very few others in attendance. But friends of friends make great friends, and–as it turned out–great readers.

A little more than a year earlier, Nick and Melanie, academics and artists living in upper Manhattan, had started a book club. From the beginning, this book club was a little unusual. For one thing, it had a name: the Novelly Unproductive Book Club, aka NUB Club. “Novelly” because the decision was to read only full-length fiction, and “Unproductive” because of the radical nature of reading for pleasure instead of giving in to the constant pressure to be hyper productive. Melanie told me that she was in the middle of a “publish or perish tenure grind” and that “taking the time to read for fun was actually a bit rebellious.”

Of course this wasn’t my first book club. There was the one with college pals centered around meals. One person would choose the book and a restaurant or a menu that was thematically connected. A great spot on Curry Row in the East Village to discuss White Teeth; sushi for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and a tea party for Persuasion. This was tons of fun, but it was hard to keep the focus on the book with all the food and gossip flying. A few years later, I tried a book club hosted at my favorite local indie book shop. It was a way to connect with likeminded neighbors and read books I might not choose on my own, but the conversation–planned and led by one individual–felt stilted and forced.

I was lucky to spend several years hosting a book club for 4th grade boys and adult male caregivers and role models. My wonderful library colleague, Susan, started a “Guys Read” club with our third grade students, and I followed her lead once the first group moved on to grade 4. These conversations were magical; the kids blew the adults away with their insights, and the boys were able to see a side of their dads, uncles, and family friends that had previously been hidden.

By the time I attended my first NUB Club meeting, I had strong feelings about book clubs in general and what I wanted from them: basically a grad school lit seminar that I had to neither teach nor be graded on. I’m not sure what I said on that four AM bus ride that got me the invite, but I knew this self-selective group was serious about literature. The book we discussed at my first meeting was Rachel Cusk’s Outline, a short, meditative character study with beautiful writing and essentially no plot. It was generally liked by the group, but “did you like it?” was almost beside the point. The analysis was about what the author was trying to do, and whether and how she succeeded. Over the years, I have enjoyed book club discussions about books I’ve detested as much or more than those about books I’ve loved. The conversations are often debates and always riveting. I will frequently find that I like a book a little bit more after a spirited exchange.

In addition to its quirky title (and, for the record, this group is so un-unproductive that they’ve created an entire website cataloging and reviewing every single book read over ten years), there are a number of other factors that make NUB Club different from any other I’ve known or known about. Every month, anyone present can nominate as many prose, fiction books as they wish, and then we vote using a system that has developed over time. The book with the most votes wins, end of story. The group meets in the same location–Nick and Melanie’s apartment–every month. The group varies in size, but averages about seven or eight.

I’m frequently asked by patrons about book clubs at the library. My usual response is, would you like to start one? I hope someone takes me up on it, but I know how hard it is to make such an endeavor really work. But it’s absolutely worth a try, because chatting, laughing, gushing, arguing, even yelling about books is among life’s most enjoyable pursuits.

And if you’re looking for a good book to start with, check out the short list at www.nubookclub.com.

Sarah Murphy is Director of the Greenwich Free Library.