Dear Richard,
There has been a lot in the papers lately about male-only clubs and of course I can see the unfairness of these grand establishment places where the members are basically running the country out of smoke-filled rooms (not that they are allowed to be smoke-filled any more). But ordinary people like me often socialise more with our own sex and no one seems to mind. My golf club is open to men and women but I can count the number of female members on the fingers of one hand.
Likewise, my wife’s book club is co-ed on paper, but when I joined after my retirement I was the only man there. I hated most of the books we chose and, to be frank, I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, so I stopped going.
I felt a bit peeved. I like the idea of reading books and having a friendly chat about them, but I don’t want to start going again if I’ll be made to feel unwelcome. Is there a way I can make this work without my wife and her fellow readers resenting me?
— G, via telegraph.co.uk
Dear G,
Aren’t you getting a bit hung up on principles here? Groucho Marx said he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member; you seem to me to be on the flipside of the same coin. Why do you want to belong to a club that you’ve already decided you hate (well, most of the books they choose to review, at any rate)?
Your wife’s book club is, de facto, a women’s group. Sure, it’s happy to welcome men but the titles they choose are simply not to your taste. So why would you want to sit there talking about a book you loathe?
In my experience, book clubs tend to choose books their members are likely to enjoy. If you ‘hated’ the titles under discussion at your wife’s club, that’ll be at least part of why you felt excluded. The others wanted a more positive series of exchanges and if book after book got a negative response from you, inevitably you were sidelined.
My advice is to search the internet for reader reviews and forums that focus on authors you like. You may well find something very like a book group online. Or here’s a suggestion – start one of your own!
