Apparently, if you’re this lady. I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that if a life is so easily malleable by something innocuous as a book club, there is something seriously wrong with the way that life was being led before it found its ad hoc therapy group. But I’m cranky this morning. So perhaps not.

It was ten years ago and I was a new mum at the local school. My son bounced into the playground and made friends while I stood on the fringes wondering what the parent protocol might be and feeling slightly awkward. Conversations were eventually struck up, coffees drunk and then, after a few months, came an invitation. Would I like to join a book club?

It was like being in an Enid Blyton story; I was being asked to join a secret society. So I was flattered — and then worried. Book clubs presumably read books and I did not do that. Oh, I read my kind of book — the kind where the writer was dead and themes were deep — but I could not possibly read contemporary fiction.

“Do you read books by living authors?” I asked. Instead of retracting the offer the women rubbed their hands together, delighted with the challenge of converting me to modernity. I will admit that I accepted more as a chance to meet other mums than to broaden my literary horizons. I held out little hope of actually enjoying any of the books.
…
Book clubs are a cure for that sudden onset of depression. Instead of feeling lost upon finishing a captivating novel, you feel a buzz of anticipation. What did the rest of the gang make of it? You do not have to foist the book you have just enjoyed upon someone and have to wait for them to decide to read it. With a book club you know a group of people are reading it at the same time as you. They drop hints. The book is getting stodgy or it has picked up after a slow start or have you got to the part where the priest . . ? No, I won’t spoil it.