Wanna join a book group? Maybe you should read this first. Me, I've been a member of two or three reading groups in my time, and one of them ranks amongst the best intellectual projects I've ever been involved in. But the books we were reading were of such a kind that our discussions tended to be analytical and explanatory; we were involved in a joint effort to get to grips with concepts and issues that were difficult to understand.
I can't see myself, though, as part of a book group reading fiction. I don't know how common the feeling is, but I want the space in which to possess, to assimilate, my own reaction to what I've read, without having it walked all over by others. This isn't because I can't defend my patch - I think I've had some reasonable practice at doing that. But once the fictional 'experience' has been pulled every which way by extensive argument, counter-argument, polemical disagreement even, it doesn't rest where it was or as it was. It's spoiled. For the same reason I hate leaving the cinema after seeing a movie I've really liked if I'm with someone who hasn't and who starts picking at it. I want to tell them to lay off.
If I were a member of a book group, just think - I might have to listen to enthusiasm for The Great Fire, or The Poisonwood Bible, or The Good Soldier. Horrors. It was bad enough reading them. Worse still, somebody could be telling me Jane Austen is just soft girl-meets-boy stuff, or Anne Tyler a woman's writer, or Cormac McCarthy a man's, or Dickens too melodramatic or his women too idealized. I'm all for freedom of opinion, but there are opinions you have to be free to steer clear of for a period after you've closed the book.