I Kind of Wish Book Clubs Would Work for Me
If you've ever noticed my bookshelf page, you'd make a guess I enjoy reading. You'd be right too. I very much enjoy reading and generally spend the last hour before bed every night with a book in my hand. The one thing I kind of wish I could do was join book clubs.
It's not that there's anything stopping me, mind you. It just doesn't really work for me and how I read. I have my backlog and everything is all nicely ordered. The problem is that I while I try to go in roughly that order, many things get in the way. Sometimes it's finding a good book from a podcast or from a recommendation in my RSS feeds. Sometimes it's just a crime of opportunity. I find one of those books available on Libby so I borrow it, or it's front and center at a bookshop so I buy it. And naturally, if I can borrow or buy it, it makes more sense to read it before buying more books (one would also guess that having books in my possession that I haven't read would prevent me from buying more...one would be wrong...and no, I don't have a problem). What this means is that my reading order is either too regimented or too chaotic to fit into a book club rotation.
I also try to stick to no more than two books being read at a time. One physical or eBook, and one audiobook. Too many books actively being read tends to cause me to miss plot points and get confused as to where things are in the story. Adding more books with strict deadlines to finish concerns me and my ability to enjoy the books I read and to be able to follow what I'm reading or listening to. And I also want to stress that it's not that I'd want to control what the club would read (it'd be hard to do anyway as I bounce around from genre to genre, which wouldn't make for a good book club), it's more my concern that it would interfere with how I like to read.
It's a shame too because there have been books I've read from all different genres that I think would be fun to have a discussion around. They might also have good recommendations for new books and/or series to read. I'm just sort of set in my ways and don't want to overload myself with more books to read with a deadline.
Maybe someday I'll find a way to integrate them into my reading habits, but for the moment, I'm happy with my reading consumption.