In October 2015 I wrote a blogpost on my Dutch blog, called ‘Sharing is caring’ (I did use that English phrase for its title). It started with the way people on social media try to convey an experience with some form of art in a way that makes them connect with their followers, or mutuals, better put. This was the time of Twitter and Buzzfeed (I speak of dating sites, do they even still exist?). Anyway, before I knew it the post turned into a rather fierce defense of why people should love reading.

I was frustrated, somewhat by my book club, that I had started from an appeal on Twitter, and somewhat by my surroundings in general. I wanted to share my experience when I read, live. That is why I was a member of a book club for a long time. Maybe it even was a part of why I was a literary (and art) critic for about five years.

I still think of the post sometimes, and that is why I looked it up and translated it. I just feel like it is so very human to want to connect, and I feel like reading is such a remarkable way to do that.

Here it is.

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Sharing is caring

I am reading a book with beautiful observations. I text the group chat, my book club, who are reading it too this month, I send a picture with a part I like to them. I put that picture on Twitter as well. Earlier on I’d already put it on there I was reading the book. And earlier still. I advance, I progress, am now at 1/3 and continually want to have people share in my experience.

Whenever someone else tweets a picture or quote or music video or Spotify link or link to an essay, that doesn’t do much for me. It helps when the person adds a little note, saying what’s so special about it – in which everyone has become as deft as Buzzfeed by the way – so well have we become masters in luring our followers in.
But what often happens, is that someone is speechless, or does not like quoting out of context, or does not know which quote to choose then, the whole article is just so good, or feels it’s stupid to say ‘what a beautiful indie rock song for this lovely Sunday’, they feel that is nonsensical, it is namely just so beautiful, just read/look/listen for yourself; in short, what often happens too, is: people only link the thing. The link refers to the source only, without comment. We then have to click the link and have the same experience and do nothing else. We could respond, still, with: ‘wow, indeed, beautiful song’, for instance but the real recipient thus fellow-feeler of this experience knows that is not necessary. Someone is saying: look. ‘I say no more.’
But that doesn’t work – I find it too much trouble to have to click first before knowing anything. It annoys me this person is pushing their own taste on me and assumes I will be enthralled as well. ‘Just click’ — arrogant, I find it.

It is hard to separate your own enthusiasm from that of others, especially in those moments when art really touches you. When you’ve really slightly become a different person because of something and are starting to view the world in a new way. That experience is important to you and amazes you, makes you look around you with surprise. You want to shake people’s shoulders and say: look! ‘You have to see this. You have to see this too. Because this is unbelievable. You have to have this experience too.’ That is what you think, and so you give it to them. You want to give it to them. But that experience is personal, and you don’t realize that.

In my book club group chat responses are coming in: someone texts a part they noticed, whoever reads the Dutch translation shows which words have been chosen in translating, one says something about the film in lieu of the book they saw.
 They say: ‘does it make sense that it takes some time to get into it?’ And: ‘I really am not getting on with it. I am reading two other books.’
 They say: ‘What is it about, actually?’

On dating sites you put your favorite film or music on your profile, you name the last book you read and then someone can acutely understand a lot more of who you are. Something I can’t understand and why I can’t find anyone attractive by definition is when somebody never reads anything. And everybody seems to respond like this: ‘Jeez, that is quite the question. Now I have to think long and hard. I don’t read very often, actually.’ This is a response I get even from journalists. Journalist of the written press, I mean. I don’t get it. That is where one of my blind spots is – how on earth can you not like reading? I love reading very much. The only explanation I can think of is that one simply does not seem to understand what reading comes down to. What it actually means to read, what reading really is.

Firstly: each book has been written for you alone. When you’re sitting on your couch reading a book, and it speaks to you, then it is written for you. That is what the writer wants. The writer might think: who am I talking to, anyway? But stronger is: am I the only one noticing this? And somewhat bemused they write it down. A cover is put around it, it is sent into the world and you buy it and take it home. You read it and you understand what was meant. If that is so, if you understand what the writer is saying, then the book has been written for you. For you alone. Literature is mail.

Secondly: every person is the same. So it turns out time and again. You read a book about a British lady in 1920 stuck in between the thick walls of a castle in rural England in the fog, she goes to the toilet, she doubts herself, she wants to have sex with the gamekeeper whom she saw bathing himself in the middle of the woods — you know. She is a person, simply, just like you are. This works every time anew – all people are the same, always and everywhere and it has always been like this. Through societal norms and the distance these yield it is not at all evident, but every time again this is recognized and acknowledged by literature: look, everyone is the same.

Thirdly: what films, music, good food now and again and art can give forth, sometimes literature manages too: the complete forgetting of yourself and changing into a purely sensuous being. You forget your head, and your body is activated. How can this happen through a book, though? It can, with some of them, books with passages in them that have been written especially for the begetting of a sensation, a physical experience I mean – disgust, fear, but also sensuality or joy. When it is written in a sensatory way how the main character experiences something there is the chance that you might feel that very strongly and that is very pleasant, to be the recipient of this – for a little while you disappear from yourself and it is as if you are present with the main character.

Fourthly: life is not a story. We need stories, to have a timeline and give us something to hold on to – the feeling things are right, or that in any way there is something to be made of them. That life might be useful, even. Literary characters test life ahead of you – they have experiences and make choices and because they, if the book is good, are proper people, you start to think about what you would do. That way you can look at your own life now and again as a story and thus, just as the characters in the story are doing, better understand who you are. Reading coming of age stories means coming of age yourself. And even if I said: everyone is the same, it is not so that each person makes the same choice. By taking stories on you can think about what you would do and so you discover who you are.

Fifthly: reading is good for your head. Don’t only read, though. Go to the bar, to the forest with your dog, go abroad — don’t just read about it. But read, because it makes you think better, makes you see differently, makes you understand more, like you have been travelling. It is so, is it not, that things are only understandable after you’ve experience in them and if it is not possible for you to know what it was like to live in other countries, genders or time zones, you can read about them and that way pick up a part of that lived experience.
But also: through language, just only language, do you learn to think better. Like learning another language it is good for your brain to read a lot. You can express yourself better, you realize that words stay behind in your mind, the ones that your subconscious has chosen for you apparently. You start to talk like they talk and let go of that again, but something of it stays behind. Your head soothes itself because of that. You get words to use, ways to express yourself, and that is something everybody needs. You receive words at your disposal.

That’s about it.

But if reading is such a solitary and catered uniquely to yourself experience, what am I doing in a book club? Well: see if it makes sense, every once in a while – if there is a match, like on Tinder, between me and books and others reading them.

Because even if it’s so very private when I feel like having that joyous experience in which I recognize the observations and thoughts of an author, at the same time that is so huge that I want to share it. I want to check, with others, if it makes sense.

I wonder if it maybe happens every once in a while that I will be sitting on my couch reading, at the same time as someone else, and think; ach, how beautiful, how beautiful, and this other will think that too, at the same time. Exactly like how everyone on twitter shares a link. ‘Now I am made a different person,’ we will think then, together.

But: if that doesn’t work that is fine too, because I know by now that is very rare. In that case a book club is good for other things also: for making people read, for reading and trying to understand why another had that experience with that book and you did not, for drinks and fun, by the way. A book club can make sure I get my nose out of books every once in a while.

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I quit my book club a year and a half ago, after nearly ten years. It was the right, but difficult decision. We (the remaining four still are on) were five women aged 30-40 (now 40-50), journalists, writers ourselves, critics. We had wildly different taste, and that was what kept it going so well for all that time – we never agreed.
The first few years were such a joy, all the serious discussions, really getting annoyed with each other, the feeling there was something very real at stake in those conversations, then having wine and laughing and telling each other about our private lives. I read books I would have never chosen myself – not even have known existed.
But the last two years I started to notice a change in myself, a change that had occurred too in my book reviewing a few years before – it was starting to stand in the way of my writing. The, although now familiar, discussions made me more and more confused, steering me away from myself, and leaving me often demotivated. They were starting to get stale, too. So after careful reconsideration I quit the book club, and now, having quit reviewing too, I am left with the luxury of having to read only those books that really speak to me. Life is short, after all, and now that I am a single mother I simply have to cut back on a lot of time, too.

I have found, by the way, that even when a fellow book club member and me absolutely adored the same book, we could not really express that towards each other. Sitting at the kitchen table, gesturing, wide eyed, happy, still we were not able to communicate, really, what we liked so much, I mean we could not find out if we really, genuinely, had had the same experience. Is it not amazing how that works? People want to connect with each other and tell each other things, but it is not so easy to really do that. (Thankfully there are other means of connecting, and staying connected, like having wine in a bar together, which I will do this friday with the fellow single mother I met through this book club.)

But apparently… I still feel like this. I still feel like I want to share my experience when I read. Why, after all, have I started this blog?