Try a Family Book Club

People joke about their love of the wine and food, but book clubs are essentially a great experience because we get to discuss one of our favorite things with some of our favorite people. I’ve participated in book clubs with both my friends and my students, but having a family book club with my adult children has been the best experience of all, one I highly recommend.

Family Book Club

It’s tough to have a family book club when kids are younger, especially if there is a spread of years in the children’s ages. You can’t read a young-adult novel with an elementary school child. Yet a ‘chapter book’ ensures that older siblings quit from boredom.

So here’s to one of the best things about having survived the teen years: thoughtful exchange is finally possible. You can read anything you’d like without worrying about its appropriateness. Your kids can pick the books, and you’ll learn something about them through their choices. Your discussions will be much more satisfying than, “Yes, I also noticed the pictures in ‘Goodnight Moon’ darkened as the night wore on.”

I have three adult sons. We came upon the idea of a family book club because we often found ourselves discussing Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” during our dinner conversations over college holidays. Many themes — race, belonging, the autonomy of the individual, and more — would take us deep into the night.

Selecting Books for the Family Book Club

It was my job to pick the first book. Since all my sons had read “Invisible Man” in high school, I wanted to connect to another book they were all familiar with through school, Camus’ “The Stranger.”

Author Kamel Daoud had recently published “The Meursault Investigation,” which narrates an Arab perspective of “The Stranger.” Scenes mirror those in Camus’s work, so a recent reading of “The Stranger” is helpful. One of the best conversations my sons and I had about “The Meursault Investigation” was on the protagonist’s shift to an existential philosophy of existence – his strange embrace of Camus. The book reviews we’d read skipped this, focusing solely on the effects of colonialism on the colonized. This led my sons to declare that book reviewers don’t actually finish the books they review.

Next, I picked a book by an author that I wanted my kids to read — “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” by Salman Rushdie. Shorter than other novels I’d read by Rushdie, it has qualities my sons love in books: playful language, mythic characters (in this case, jinn or genies) and philosophical quandaries. This one- thousand-and-one-night clash between light and darkness was a perfect choice.

High on our success, we decided to try David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” This was our first (epic) failure as we couldn’t get through it, and our only discussion was on an essay-length footnote. Taken back, I asked my middle son, a serious fantasy fiction reader, to pick something we’d all enjoy. He selected “Lud-in-the Mist” by Hope Mirrlees. I love this tale of a town bordering Faerie land. The characters are as fully developed as any in literary fiction. The world-building evokes wonder. As someone little acquainted with fantasy, I was delighted with the new genre which also took me back to Christina Rossetti’s poem, “Goblin Market.”

Thinking on our success with otherworldly elements, we next decided on the surrealistic “Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories” by Bruno Schulz. Schulz’s life and his death at the hands of a Nazi officer are compelling in themselves, illuminating his ability to imagine strange creatures invading a home while family members become unhinged. Our family conversations centered on the ways magic realism affected the lives of the characters.

Sometimes You Win . . .

We are currently having a rough go with “Mistress of Mistresses” by E. R. Eddison, an author described by Tolkien as “the most convincing writer of invented worlds” that he’d ever read. “Mistress” is a highly symbolic fantasy written in the 1930s. My oldest son thinks it makes too much of outmoded ideals of the Nietzschean superman. My middle son loves it because of the symbols and archetypes, ones that I find too unlike real people — women who represent Aphrodite in perfect beauty, intelligence and grace, for example. My youngest son read the first four pages of the purple prose and said, “I’m done.” My husband never started it because it isn’t on audiobook. The disappointment of my middle son is palpable. He wanted us to connect to ideas that are meaningful to him, and we failed to do so.

Oddly, many of the books have one thing in common — commentary by Neil Gaiman, as if he has read every fantasy and surrealistic novel available. So I take that as my cue. Next, we’ll read Gaiman’s “Norse Mythology,” which, based on our experience thus far, I expect will be a complete success.

If you have any suggestions for a family book club selection, please let me know.

(Published yesterday in the Southern California News Group papers):