Book Club Log #9
Book: The Plague by Albert Camus
Arrived like 15 mins early, but didn't mind so much. Guess I'm becoming a lot more used to this book club space. Though I was also very tired so I spent most of it not paying that close of attention (and started doodling, which is how you know that the topics don't particularly interest me). But almost no one came on time so we didn't even really start till like 10 or 15 mins after the supposed start time.
Me, Multiple Names Guy, and Old Guy had each sent in questions, so the list of questions was quite long. We didn't get to like any of them. Instead, we were asked about our general impressions of the book, and I went and derailed everyone by saying an off-comment about how I was kind of annoyed that there wasn't like a single important female character in this book. I really only expected this to take like 3 mins of conversation at most, but people really jumped in with like, theories about why that could be -- Camus not interacting a lot with women and writing what he knows; differing expectations for representation in those times -- and people just saying they don't expect to see much of themselves reflected in an old book written by a man. (Not that they were necessarily defending the lack of women but that was their frame of approach.) All of this could be true and I understand not having much expectations according to genre and author (hell, why else am I stuck in a mahou shoujo + romance genre hole), but two things: 1) Even if all of that is true and we don't need to have those types of expectations, I don't actually like spending my limited time on earth reading books by white men who aren't even trying in this department as purely an individual "what do I enjoy and what do I get most out of" choice; 2) it was literally just a side comment because I thought I'd just throw something out there and not what I actually wanted to talk about!! You truly have to be careful about these kinds of side comments where everyone has an opinion about it because then it just takes on a life of its own.
So anyway, people talked about random stuff. Don't even recall much of what anymore but it wasn't that interesting to me as it didn't seem terribly on topic. Something about parasociality and whatnot. From the haze of what I can remember, an interesting theory was that The Plague was a metaphor for Nazi Germany (besides being about a plague). Big hm on that one.
We didn't get to the question about hope or hopelessness, which I contributed and which was inspired by the YouTube essay Multiple Names Guy sent in the chat twice that made him even want to read this book to begin with. I have no idea whether we even talked about anything he wanted to talk about, but truly book clubs with more than like 4 people are a force you can't control unless you're really vocal, which I am not. Too bad because that's the only thing I really was interested in discussing anyway, but idc enough since I know not to expect super deep cuts and analysis etc. from this club. On the contrary, the few times we've had people who were philosophy brained, the whole conversation dragged for everyone else who didn't understand the terms they were using. So having people at least quip and throw jokes around their random topics is better as the mood isn't tanked.
At any rate, Multiple Names Guy brought a friend with him who talked a lot and with whom he implied he already had discussed the book with, so maybe he got what he wanted from that dude instead.
Afterwards, because we had only like 6 or 7 people, they just all talked about horror movies (which I generally have no interest in because watching overly scary or gory stuff deeply unsettles my sense of safety) and tattoos and their pets.
Not!pop star is moving to another city soon, which is sad because she's really funny and social. She said she'll come to the book club anyways sometimes to hang out, but we'll have to see how that turns out.
I actually bought the book for next month's since it's Indigenous history related, but it cost me basically $20, which is like $5 more than I was expecting. I mostly did this because I feel bad for not buying a book a single time I've come to book club (almost a whole year now), but I think I'll limit myself to one purchase a year, maybe two. I don't exactly have a lot of book space and it's not like I have a real income, so spending money always bothers me. Hopefully this book is very informative.