Why Reading in Community Matters

I finished Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety yesterday with fifteen minutes to spare before my favorite virtual bookclub began. Each month, I join Sara and my fellow Fiction Matters Patrons for Zoom book discussions and I can say, without a doubt, this group has changed me as a reader. I have long believed that while reading itself is an amazing solitary activity, reading in community is just plain magical. Our discussion yesterday was proof of this.

I tried to read Crossing to Safety many times over the years as this book is often cited as a 'favorite’ on reader’s lists. But… as it is a lyrical, character driven novel, I stopped reading it each time before this one. I now know that listening to character driven novels is the way to go for me but that is a topic for another day. So for now… back to yesterday.

I finished reading and immediately declared Crossing to Safety as one of my all time favorite reads. I jumped into our discussion to declare such and wondered how anyone could not like this book. The conversation went on similarly for a bit. Crossing to Safety is a beautiful discussion of friendship, marriage and academia. The writing is gorgeous and if I were someone who underlined while reading, my book would have been full of pencil marks. What in the world could be wrong with this gem of a book?

Enter- Why Reading in Community Matters.

About half way through our discussion, a fellow patron broke up the love fest for Crossing to Safety. She called the book out for what it is- a book written by a white male about a group of privileged, white people. Suddenly, I panicked. I have been consciously trying to read more broadly. To read books by people of color. To read more ‘window’ than ‘mirror’ books and suddenly, here I am loving a book about a bunch of people just like me. In addition, the women in this book are clearly supporting their husbands careers and getting no recognition for it and on and on.

Suddenly, I went from loving this book to considering what loving this book said about me as a person. At one point, I wondered out loud if people’s feelings about these issues would change if we viewed Crossing to Safety as a piece of historical fiction. The book was published in 1987 but beyond that, it is set even earlier, beginning in the days following the Great Depression. So- really, the characters, the setting, the plot (or what there is of a plot) ring very true to the people and the time period described.

At this point in the discussion, Sara asked us to think about the following- why do we tend to think about the universal when a book’s author is a white male and then the specifics when the author is from a marginalized group. Sara said this more eloquently, but this was the gist and is something I had never considered So why do we do this? And if we look at Crossing to Safety as a snapshot in time about a specific group of people does that change our overall perception and does it change our views of the flaws in the novel?

And this is why I love reading in community. Were it not for bookclub, I would have continued to think abut the characters in Crossing to Safety because they are those kinds of characters but I would have never asked any of these big questions. And while I am a bit frustrated that I now have many unanswered questions about this new favorite, I am grateful to have them.

I am so curious to know if you have had an experience like this with a bookclub or a discussion of a common read with a friend. If you have, please share! I could have these kinds of conversations all day long.