Hello, My Name Is Laura … and I Might Just Be a Book Club Failure

I love to read, I love my lady friends, and I love wine — I should be a book club natural, right?

Wrong.

The Challenge: Finish a novel in less than a night, because I am a professional procrastinator

The night before my very first book club meeting ever, I put the kids to bed, shut my bedroom door, and set out to read like I had never read before. I had approximately 23 hours, I figured, to read a 369-page novel, form an opinion about character development and story arc, and develop some high-minded ideas and thoughts about literature — and likely had to spend 8 of those hours working, 2 hours commuting, 1 or more harassing my children to eat/sleep/get dressed/stop fighting, and another 8 (ha!) sleeping.

The Effort

I started shortly after 8:00 PM. The book was a novel I probably would not have picked myself because … chick lit. And really, because fiction. I toil almost solely in memoir, essays, nonfiction, and food magazines. It’s something about the intimacy of a real person’s voice on the page, someone you already know in some ways — and the way I can distinctly picture my author.

Fiction made me use another part of my brain. And, although the pages breezed by, it felt a little like work.

By 12:45 AM, relying on a steady mix of speed-reading skills from college and sheer determination, I had made it all the way to page 219. And then I passed out.

The Outcome

The next night, around 7:00 PM, I showed up at the meeting. It was a group of a dozen or so women I knew from preschool. We were more than just familiar, but not close enough that I would know what books they had on their nightstands — or even where the night would take us.

I was anxious in that way I get before presentations or tests — do I know what the hell I’m talking about? Am I gonna sound like an idiot? And I was basically relying on a skill that got me through high school and college with honors — that I can remember almost anything for about two days, before it leaves me forever.

But you know what? It was fine. Fine! Someone said, more or less, I didn’t really like it. Someone else said, Oh, really? I totally did. And then it devolved into personal stories connected to the plot — about disability and death and how cute our children are and did we all have advanced directives?

And the wine was delicious.

Up Next

To be completely honest, it’s been a month now and I still haven’t finished book number one — and I’ve yet to even crack the spine on book number two, which we’ll be talking about tomorrow night. But I don’t particularly think it’s such a bad thing. I went into this Book Club with a mindset fit for a student — that there’s some test to pass (or fail), some knowledge that I’m supposed to glean, some big, deep thoughts I’m supposed to express. And that’s where I went wrong. Books Clubs, circa Los Angeles, 2015, are about the love of reading, sharing good stories, tying fiction to real life, and, honestly, talking smack, toasting glasses, and simply being among friends on a weeknight — just because. And on that note, I’m still an A student.