Reading Groups: a new idea

 

photo by Paréj Richárd on Unsplash

I became interested in reading groups when I was having dinner with three librarians at a conference recently. They were all members of the same (long-distance) reading group. When asked what they were currently reading, none of them could remember! I’ve heard of books having an influence, but never of a book having so little effect that three members couldn’t recollect the title, or even the plot. It suggested that the real motivation for many reading groups is just to get people together; which perhaps is no bad thing. Reading may be for many reasons; I remember my mother borrowing armfuls of romantic fiction titles from the local public library, giving me the impression that filling the time was the key function of these books.

Following my discovery of the forgetful reading group, as an exercise, whenever I meet people for social chat, I asked them if they are involved with a reading group. All the women are present or recent members of a reading group; none of the men. Then I asked them how they got on with the group.

Organisation

A common gripe among members is having to read something they don’t like. However, the mechanism for choosing books seems to invite this kind of criticism – in one case, one person chooses all the books, but in several instances it seemed to be not quite a democratic process, meaning that each member had an equal opportunity to suggest new titles entirely of their choice. Of course, looking for consensus is its own form of censorship. Something very innovative is unlikely to be chosen if suggested by only one member.

Which books?

Strangely (in my opinion) reading groups seem to concentrate on fiction, and recent fiction at that, “recent” meaning from the last 25 years or so. Suggestions that something older could be considered are usually not received with any warmth. Perhaps I’m unusual, but I feel that this kind of selection process is likely to focus on subject matter rather than quality, I would imagine.

A reading group that never meets

One local reading group enthusiast talked about a very different formula. The group never meets in person; the group leader simply assembles every few months extracts or comments from the members, which she then distributes as a print booklet for the others to enjoy. I was given an example of this output, and initially I was very excited. My enthusiasm waned somewhat when I realised that many of the extracts were just that, included without any comment, leaving me none the wiser if the reader approved or disapproved of the extract, or of any other opinion. The reprinting of an entire Tim Dowling column from The Guardian suggested an uncritical enthusiasm.

What are reading groups for?

So often, a discussion about a book involves people talking past each other. X likes the book, because she enjoys horse riding. Well, it might be a justification, but not for Y, who likes historical dramas. You sense we aren’t really talking about the book, here: the act of reading is reduced to individual taste, rather than engaging with the text in a meaningful way. But perhaps I’m over-thinking it – maybe the dinner is the most important criterion, not the book.

A new idea for reading groups

Having to read a whole book is a slog; life’s too short for me to devote several days, if not weeks, to struggling with a book I didn’t choose. My preference would be to select short stories, or something so short that everyone can read it even the same day if necessary. Perhaps even better might be to have a reading group where nobody has to read anything new at all! Each member simply has to talk about something interesting they have read since the last meeting. There is no obligation for others to read it; but the person reading it will feel the need to justify their choice to the others. I will promote it as “the reading group where nobody has to read anything new”, an idea so novel that it will probably be suspected as some kind of plot. Not, of course, a fictional plot. 

William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How India transformed the world

 

Ashoka Pillar at Vaishali, Bihar, India (c250 BCE) [Wikipedia]

After the excellence of Dalrymple’s The Anarchy (2019), it proved a real challenge to get through The Golden Road (2024). It might have sold more copies than the earlier book, but it is a much less entertaining read; it’s not so easy to follow the vast canvas. In this book, Dalrymple has taken on subjects well outside his core territory. His thesis is that India exported religion, culture, and science, during the period from the Buddha (C5 BCE) to around 1250, not that he tells you explicitly these parameters. Dalrymple is a great narrative historian, but not all histories make for good narratives, and this book is an example. Within a few days of finishing it, I could remember only a few key individuals, such as the monk Xuangzang. History of science is not his forte, and I feel there as an element of uncertainty about his arguments that is revealed by the vast number of footnotes (there are around 98 pages of footnotes for 289 pages of text). Referencing your sources is a good principle, but here the subject is too vast, both by location and by subject, for Dalrymple to keep in manageable proportions, and the endless footnotes suggest he hasn’t quite mastered the (largely secondary) sources. He draws on a few primary sources, but many of the references are to other secondary works (inevitable, given that he is covering India, the Middle East, China, and Southeast Asia over a period of 1,000 years).

The book describes well the transmission of Buddhism via traders and wealthy donors (who paid for the large number of sculptures and buildings across SE Asia) – not the way I imagined early Buddhism at all.

perhaps counter-intuitively for a faith that embraced poverty and renunciation as an ideal, it was spread around the globe most effectively by wealthy merchants engaged in trade.[p42]

To give an example of the strength and weakness of the book, here is a quote that had me scratching my head:

But just as it was the conquest of northern India by the Kushans that opened the way for the Buddhist conquest of China, so it was the Umayyad Arab conquest of Central Asia, and its absorption into the wider Islamic world, that opened the way for Indian learning to seduce the western mind with its brilliance and sophistication. [p246]

Even if you are familiar with the Kushans and the Umayyad conquest, which I am not, you will find this proposition contrary to your expectations. Dalrymple is stating that in both cases, India was conquered, and yet its ideas were exported. That may have been the case (take the Roman conquest of Greece), but it requires some explanation.

The big questions I have from the text are around these cultural spreads. Why was Buddhism so popular outside India, when it did not spread even across the whole of India? Why did Jainism never gain significant followers outside India? And then, why did Buddhism start to be replaced after around 1200 in China and SE Asia? As a historian, Dalrymple is of course dependent on his sources, but these questions I think deserve answering.  

A few notes on the e-book (Kindle) edition

• Uses CE/BCE in the text, but AD/BC on the paperback cover
• I am reading the e-book and there don’t appear to be any illustrations. As often happens with e-book editions, there are credits for photographs, but not a photo to be seen. Nor does this edition have any maps.
• The index has a very strange layout, not helpful at all. Here are the first few entries:

• Readers use page numbers to get some idea of the type of reference, but if all the references are to “here”, the reader has no clues whatever – are these references found close together, in one chapter, or widely separated?
• The book has ten chapters, and as often found in pop history books, the chapter titles tell you little or nothing about what the chapter is about; the main coverage of the monk Xuangzang, who travelled from China to India in search of Buddhist learning, is covered in the chapter “The Sea of Jewels”.

All in all, Dalrymple is a fine historian, and all credit to him for using art and architecture as a way in to periods of history about which I for one know very little. It could have been better organised, but I am grateful for the insights and analysis provided.