Starting a Book Club
African romance, anyone?
Message sent to Elise of Group Hug:
I found Group Hug through the Culture Study newsletter, to which I have been a subscriber since 2021. I am staying because just ahead of my 30th birthday I am acutely aware of the fact that outside of the group of about five friends I have had since high school, I have never had another space that felt like home. I am Kenyan, born, raised, and living in Nairobi, and our social structures are not set up to encourage connection around the casual enjoyment of a thing, and especially not outside of school and church. The few places where I have looked for this kind of community have not felt quite right, usually because either I just didn't love the thing enough or more was expected from me than I could happily give. Now in the phase of life when the friends of my heart are moving far away for work or for love or for journey, I want to create the kind of space where I would fit, where others like me would fit, where I would have fit when I was younger. I am of the reserved sort who don't have much to say until the conditions are just right, so as I read you l want to think about how I can make these spaces and invite others into them while being deeply myself and fully open.
So I started the book club. I set up an event on Eventbrite, got several people signing up, which led me to marking the event as sold out because I am neither skilled nor enthusiastic as a hostess and I would not know what to do with 20 people in my home. I reached out to those who signed up, asked them to fill a Google Form to help me keep track of members and help them find enough details to determine whether this endeavour was a good fit for them. I didn't hear back from about half. I created a Whatsapp group. And so came our first meet-up in January. Three people showed up.
We got to know each other, had some wine and pizza, talked about what we would like this to be.
In the time since, these have been my thoughts.
Welcoming people into your home is nerve-wracking. Being welcomed into someone’s home is nerve-wracking.
I was afraid criminals might show up at my door. They were afraid they were showing up at a criminal’s door. As a society, we used to be a lot more comfortable inviting people into our homes. People we met at church or at work or on the street. But the world is not what it used to be. It is not only a matter of safety though, I think.
Everybody on TikTok seems to live in a show house, and then you live in a house house, with family, and there is dust, clutter, dirty dishes, things that make no aesthetic sense, and just so much evidence that people live here—and they don’t enjoy chores. This is, in part, why I chose to host the book club in my home. We keep people out of our homes to keep them at arm’s length, to protect ourselves from discomfort. We don’t want to perform out there in the world and then perform some more in our homes. But what would it look like for me to invite people into my home and still not perform.
I am not a great hostess; can I be okay with my book club members witnessing me bumble through it?
I am not comfortable making conversation with people I have not had time to get to know slowly; can I settle into the awkwardness of talking and listening without a script?
Our homes uncurated betray who we are; can I allow people I barely know to find out more about me and my life than I could hope to know about them and their lives?
I want to cultivate genuine connection. I want to be who I am. I want to be open. So I opened up my home.
Decision-making by consensus works once trust and intimacy have begun to take root.
I let the book club members know from our first interactions that I was just starting this thing and was hoping we could figure it out together. I had never done anything of the sort before and was not interested in acting like I knew what was doing. We discussed how we would run things, including financial contribution and how we would select books. But because everybody’s lives are a lot, I found that participation in our Whatsapp group wasn’t great, which made it difficult to make decisions together.
How I interpreted it was that we didn’t have any history we could lean on to chart the way forward, so everyone resorted to: “Well, whatever you guys decide.” I realised that at this stage, decision making was too big an ask. Now I decide what we read. I am hoping that with time, and more members, this can become more collective.
Clarity of vision makes things easier for everyone.
All I knew starting out was that I wanted a book club that was easy to get to and that would focus exclusively on the romance genre. I took for granted that the people I would find would enjoy the same kinds of romance novels that I do. I was very very wrong. It became clear quite quickly that we would have difficulty picking what to read because the genre is an ocean and we were a bit of seaweed. To add to that, what do we consider as within the genre and what outside of it?
I needed to sharpen my vision if we were to make any progress. Eventually, I landed on “love story-centric and written by an African author.” This way, we narrow things down considerably and ease decision making. More importantly, if I was going to do this, I wanted to contribute to the literary ecosystem in which I exist. I have been interested in the romance genre in Kenya and Africa for years, and this felt like a good opportunity to dig into it. I want to find out which authors and publishers are producing in the genre and how. I hope to share what I learn.
It’s not going to look like your vision right away.
In narrowing our focus to romance by African writers we created a new problem for ourselves. I read most of my romance on Kindle and I know that local bookshops have been focusing more and more on stocking African writers, so I neglected to consider accessibility. The first book we chose was difficult to find in bookshops, and we had to skip the next meet-up because several members couldn’t find the book in physical or digital form. I got a copy, but it was one of only two in one bookshop out of the four I checked.
I recognised this as a distribution challenge, common in the publishing world. I would love to talk to people in the business about why it is often so difficult to find African books in digital form. My guesses are to do with 1) this market’s preference for physical copies, 2) our love for pirated soft copies, and 3) publishing infrastructure for ebooks and audiobooks. I am also curious about the decision making processes that determine which books will end up, and in what numbers, on local bookstore shelves—in Kenya. And how do we as readers tangibly contribute to raising the demand and therefore the supply?
I spoke to the nice people at Soma Nami Books, who shared that they encourage book clubs to ask about their selected reads a month in advance at least, so that they can set about acquiring copies. It helps, then, to be able to decide next reads quickly, especially for us, who are reading two books a month. I am looking forward to seeing how streamlined the book selection and acquiring process becomes for our book club over this year.
All this to say that it’s been a bumpy start. But I have a clear picture in my mind of what I would like us to experience in this book club, the energy in the room when we will be having the kind of discussions that pull us open and closer and higher. I don’t know when we will get there, but I am hopeful we will.
The pressure to curate haunts us all. Resist. Let it be uncomfortable.
I wonder often whether I should create some sort of structure for the book club meet-ups. I think about developing discussion questions, about sending them in advance to the members so they can have a think before we meet, about creating presentations to guide the conversation. I think about following up with each member to find out whether they were able to get the book, whether they have read it yet, whether they will be showing up, whether they have ideas for how we can do things.
I do not do these things, at least not yet, because I recognise anxiety when I see it. I am looking for ways to smoothen the experience of showing up to a conversation with people I don’t know well without prepared talking points. I am looking for ways to sound like I know what I am talking about. I am looking for ways to justify inviting people to read a book and then come talk about it with me. I am looking for ways to shorten the process of connecting with new people as just a person, not as an impressive person.
Instead, I want to try the just a person route. I want to practise a kind of vulnerability I have not allowed before. “Good friction means we have to rely on other people to figure it out.” I want to allow the friction and allow the reliance.
I do not know how this is going to go. I know that I am curious and open. I know that I love to read and I love to think about how we love, and I would like to have filling conversations about this with similarly inclined people. With any luck, I find them, and we live happily ever after.
The Roses & Wine Book Club meets two Thursday evenings a month in Nairobi to discuss romance novels by African writers. If you are interested, please check out this Google Form.