David: Reading Outside Your Comfort Zone
At book club, we take it in turns to suggest books for us to read as a group. Whoever volunteers will bring along three suggestions for everyone attending to vote on. David is a big sci-fi and fantasy reader, and their suggestions, I would say, have gone down very well with the gang so far. My favourite of David’s choices has been The Meister of Decimen City by Brenna Raney, a crazy story following an asexual super-genius and her lab-grown dinosaurs, which made for a really fun book club meeting. Taking it in turns to suggest books means we read a variety of genres and David went on to talk about how book club has given him reason to read outside his usual range:
“[Book club has] definitely pushed me outside my normal comfort zone! [For example,] I read almost no non-fiction. I think Ace by Angela Chen might have been the first non-fiction book I’d read in, what? Five years.”
David is someone who will always finish a book before attending book club. Reading beyond their usual choices has made “some of the books a bit of hard work”, but that the meetings he attends when he doesn’t like the book, or he has strong opinions, are often his favourite ones.
“Sometimes not liking the book is the best time to go to a book club. You can have a nice argument. I love arguing about books with people.”
But for David, it’s not just about reading books he otherwise wouldn’t, but meeting people he otherwise wouldn’t as well: “I have met people there that I just wouldn’t have run into in other places.” And he mentioned that he has made friends here that he regularly socialises with outside of book club meetings.
David said that book club is “welcoming” and “fun” and he really likes how “inclusive” the space is.
“It’s not like we go around making people justify having turned up, you know, people can just show up, having read the book or not, even – that’s pretty inclusive for a book club: not requiring the book has been read. Yeah, just very welcoming generally I would say, as long as you are okay with having, like, extremely random discussions and arguments and stuff happening while you’re there.”
Having only read one or two books with ace characters before joining book club, David came along to that first book discussion about Loveless by Alice Oseman feeling seen both by the book and by the conversations that evening.
“Loveless is the one that by far the closest to reflecting my story. Like, shockingly close! Almost painfully close at times. There were so many people [at that first meeting] that were like ‘yeah, this is my exact experience put into words.’”
David enjoys coming along to book club for because he “really likes the discussions.” He has made friends here, and book club has given him a “good reason to read books which are a little outside [his] usual”.