vgriff

I love to talk about books. When it was my job I used to talk about books all day every day. Now that I don’t have that luxury I try to find other ways to scratch that itch.

Of course there’s this blog, where I can talk to Elise and to the rest of you about what I’m reading. It’s awesome and I love it but it’s not enough.

I’m in a book club (shout out to Quitters Club Book Club!) and I love it but we only meet once a month and talk about one book at a time. That’s not enough.

There’s also Goodreads, where I can see a steady trickle of what my friends are reading and rate and review my own stuff. I am a superfan of the Goodreads Reading Challenge and obsessively track what I’ve been reading. I also try to write a review of each book I read. A friend inspired me to try to write 25 word book reviews — long enough to be interesting, short enough to keep a reader’s interest. It’s fun but also not enough.

There’s also Round Robin Reading, a book sharing thing I do with one or two friends. Each of us buys a hardcover book that the others either want to read or are curious about. You open the book to the first page and write your name and the start date. Then you read it and you mark the hell out of it. You talk to your friends as though they’re right there with you. You underline passages, make notes about what the text says, make notes that have nothing to do with the text, draw smiley faces, exclamation points, hearts. You dog-ear and add post-it notes. Then you pass the book to the next person for them to do the same. And so on. Eventually the book makes its way back to the original owner and that person has a beautiful, well-read and marked-up object that is kind of a self-contained book club, sitting right there on your shelf whenever you might want to dip into it. It works best if each person sticks to one writing implement so you can tell who wrote what — maybe I’ll use a blue pen and the second reader will use a pencil and the third, a green marker. [Obviously this doesn’t work if you are one of those people who think books are sacred objects and need to be preserved in plastic — that’s not my thing, but you know, you be you. I like my books marked up and well-loved.]

Another option is to pick a book to work through with a bunch of people, sort of a one-time-only book club. My team at work is awesome, and all four of us are in places where we’re thinking about what comes next, whether it’s a new project or a new job entirely. We all read Do More Great Work and for a month we met every week over breakfast to discuss and do the exercises together. It was great, and I definitely got more out of it than I would have alone.

But it’s still not enough.

(There might be something wrong with me.)