As I’ve mentioned, I read a lot. Most of the books I read are non-fiction — history, biographies, economics, politics, and various other topics.
As it happens, there’s a book club in my neighborhood that’s been meeting for years, but it’s restricted to women, and they read only literary fiction. A year and a half ago one of my neighbors, who reads a lot of history, asked if I’d be interested in forming a non-fiction book club for the men in the neighborhood. (Yes, I know there are all kinds of sexist intimations running through that idea, but fair is fair.) I agreed and we reached out to ten other guys in the neighborhood who I thought might be interested. Most of them said yes, and we started meeting every six weeks.
We stopped getting together in the spring when the epidemic shut everything down, but now we’re meeting again — either on Zoom or, when the weather cooperates, in someone’s backyard, spaced well apart.
It became apparent early on that ours was not really a “book club” so much as an informal discussion group in which whatever books we were reading provided the catalyst for the discussion. One member of our group suggested we call it a “gentlemen’s salon,” in the spirit of the gatherings that characterized the literary and philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries. That struck me as too pretentious by half, but I was willing to meet him part-way and have since referred to the group as a “book salon.”
Since my retirement I was already reading an hour or more a day, but when the pandemic eliminated most of the options for doing things outside the home, I doubled down on my reading. Aside from whatever I read online, including a lot of the New York Times and some of the Washington Post, I’m now spending two to three hours a day just reading books. When the book salon met last weekend I told the group about the five books I’d read since we’d met six weeks before and the three books I’m reading now: David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman, Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, and Which Country Has the World’s Best Healthcare? by Zeke Emanuel. (I’ll be blogging about those as I finish them.)
Others in the group accused me of being an overachiever and one suggested that we could just spend each meeting talking about the books I was reading. (I think they were just teasing me.)
What’s interesting is that I’m a slow reader. I attribute that in part to the fact that I worked for years as a radio announcer, so I got used to reading out loud at a speaking pace. Now when I read I do essentially the same thing, except that I do it on “internal speaker.” Through all the years that I was working full time I had a long list of books that I aspired to read, and I often went ahead and bought them, but I got through only a handful of books a year and the stack just kept getting higher. I certainly never expected to be an overachiever in the reading department.
But when I stopped working I decided that one of my “retirement gigs” would be reading. That means I approach it as I would a part-time job: I show up for it regardless of whether I’m in the mood. Some of the books are ones that I want to read, and others are ones that I want to have read. All this reading has given me a strong sense of having expanded my intellectual horizons since I retired, which was pretty much the point of the exercise.
Now, of course, in addition to whatever value I get from reading these books, they also give me something to write about on this blog. Lucky you.
This hits very close to home.