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Today's book clubs: no books allowed!

The New York Daily News documents the demise of many young women’s book clubs in the big bad city, due mainly to the fact that their members aren’t reading the books and are instead talking about their sex lives and everything in between.

One book club spent a recent evening learning the intracacies of oral sex, a far jollier topic than the decidedly more somber title on deck — Elie Weisel’s harrowing Holocaust memoir Night.

Book club member Jen Bolt says, “It’s great that we oftentimes get off our slated topic of discussion and talk about things of a more racy nature, because if you can’t talk about it with your girlfriends, then who can you talk to?”

Kiersten Correnti started her book club to make friends and, now that she has them, she’s cast aside the book, a mere pawn in her game. “[Her fellow book clubbers] were all interested in the book part but then we would also have these incredible conversations that would last for like three hours, and the book part became like homework after a while,” Correnti says. This has led to her banishing the reading of a book and any discussion about it to every other month.

Jennifer Weiner, an author whose chicklit is read at plenty of book clubs, sometimes partakes of them herself. “It’s a weird thing to have an author there in the first place because it inhibits the discussion and nobody wants to admit they didn’t read the thing. So you get a lot of ‘I loved it,’ followed by a long silence,” says Weiner.

Book clubs have strayed so far from any intelligent discourse of an intelligent book that the new non-book book club is being turned into a CBS show called Tuesday Night Book Club that “follows a group of real-life women at their weekly club meetings, where most everything — except, of course, books — is talked about in graphic detail”, and they get to enjoy a “Botox party,” apparently.

We at In Other Media would rather get a shot of poison to the face than read chicklit, anyway.

Related links:
Check out the New York Daily News story here

By

June 15th, 2006

12:00 am

Category: Book news

Tagged with: book clubs, media, memoir, women