Rounding up one month of our book club!

Hello! My name is Pranav. I’m a recovering reader, and I invite you to join me.

Last Saturday, we held the fourth session of our little book club. It wasn’t anything fancy. We all sat in silence in a sterile white room and poured over books for a couple of hours. And then, once we had our fill, we sat and talked about what we read.

If you looked in from the outside, you would have found it deeply unexciting. You may have wondered how empty our lives are, and if we were so starved for social company that we were willing to tolerate idle silence for two hours, just to have other people around us.

But if you stepped in and read with us, you would have learnt our secret: all this time, we were filling our souls with joy.

As a recovering reader, let me tell you why.

The problem with books, when you start reading, is that they are terribly boring. They’re misfits in a digital era. They aren’t built to manipulate you, or to feed your fantasies of sex, fame and belonging. They aren’t engineered to give you measured hits of pleasure, in dosages prescribed by an all-knowing algorithm, the way they give drugs to lab monkeys.

Books can’t game you. They don’t tap into your brainstem; they can’t ping you with waves of dopamine.

That’s why it’s so bloody hard to read. The worst moments of our book club all come in the first half hour. People keep looking around awkwardly, between attempts to drag their eyes through the length of a page. The poor things are horrified — they’re suddenly wondering why they sacrificed a Saturday morning to sit by themselves in a random office building. You can see them itch for a feed to swipe their fingers to.

But if you brave through the awkwardness, you get to joy. The books begin to perform their spell. People relax. Reading becomes easier. You start hearing turning pages. People lose themselves — now, they’re nodding, and making faces, and smiling to nobody, all while staring into their books.

You know, until recently, I had almost forgotten the feeling of being taken in by a good book. That sense of being lost in someone else’s ideas for hours? You don’t get that in the digital world. It’s not the sort of thing you get in the innards of a database. In an AI-drenched world, it feels human.

Reading is a selfless activity. Books don’t indulge you. They’re a commitment. They don’t give you easy pay-offs; they make you work. You have to play your part in the dance. You have to match your mental rhythms to those of the author. You have to trust them, and go where they take you. You have to give them time.

But in return, a good book can leave you stunned. Because you give so much of yourself to it; because you’re taking the profound effort of making each of the author’s words ring in your head, every word cuts deeper. A single well-told line can knock you out. There’s nothing that compares. A good book is like a warm, happy marriage in a hook-up filled world.

Here’s why I think we’re on to something with this book club. At the end of each of our four sessions, people looked refreshed. Sitting in a room full of strangers is an odd, awkward thing. By the end, though, that never seems to matter. Fascinations, it turns out, are as potent a social lubricant as any liquor you can find. You can see books leave their mark by how people forget themselves, and their social defences, and give in to child-like wonder — about stories, ideas, and even sentences. And what is more beautiful than that?

So why join our book club? Because it will help you replace pleasure with joy, and your fantasies with fascinations. And those are wonderful trades to make.

If you’re in, come see us this coming Saturday morning!

Link to our book club.