Interested in joining a book club? Check out VPL’s adult book club programs on Eventbrite!  

At the end of summer, I like to do a rewatch of one of my comfort films, The Jane Austen Book Club. I pick this time of year because the setting is crisp Northern California, seemingly perpetually at sunset. It’s a perfect transition into fall. It’s also a great example of what makes book clubs so appealing. In the film (and the book upon which it’s based), the Jane Austen Book Club is formed as a salve for a friend group going through various crises.

As the characters delve into the novels, they start recognizing themselves in Austen’s stories. They bring their own unique experiences and struggles to their understanding of Austen’s themes, leading to thoughtful discussions of characters and events with their own personal spins. Take, for example, the discussions of Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price (“I love Fanny. She puts her family’s needs before her own” “She’d probably be easier to like if she would allow some weakness in others”) or Pride and Prejudice’s Charlotte Lucas (“I kind of admire Charlotte for looking at her situation and deciding to marry Mr. Collins … She knows he’ll never be the love of her life, but that’s okay”).  

These kinds of nuanced discussions are the result of a group of disparate readers coming together over a shared book; a single reader might pick up on certain themes, or form certain ideas, but those ideas can be subject to the reader’s prejudice. Sharing them with other readers can open up a whole new world of ideas. One of my favourite aspects of books clubs is simply seeing what worked about a book (or didn’t work) for different readers and getting into why. Whether the group agrees or not isn’t the point—we’re just working those thinking muscles!