Why I joined a weird Zoom book club

An update from my ongoing quest to undo brain rot

I’ve never been a book club person. Kate and a bunch of our mutual friends have had a sci-fi book club for 13 years, and I was never particularly interested in joining, mostly because I’m not normally a big fiction reader. But even when another friend put together a non-fiction book club, I dabbled for a few weeks and then dropped out. Don’t get me wrong, I like to read. But reading is such a quintessentially solitary act, and I’ve always felt more comfortable reading at my own pace, picking books up and dropping them, operating without obligation.

But last week, I attended my first meeting of an online reading group.

It’s a new thing for me, and frankly, I don’t know whether I’ll like it. But the confluence of a few factors inspired me to try something new even though, to be totally honest, trying new things is not really my forte.

I’m just beginning, so I don’t have any great literary insights yet. But while the course of events that brought me to this specific juncture is somewhat idiosyncratic, I think the basic issues that I’m wrestling with on this journey — digital media brain rot, post-pandemic disruptions to our habits, male friendship, parenting — are probably things that a lot of people are dealing with.

And I’m not going to suggest that everyone should follow my path here, but it does occur to me that a general reluctance to try new things is almost certainly not all that rare.

But whatever mundane issues we’re struggling with, “try something different” strikes me as an underrated option. Relatedly, the longer that I cover politics the more I have the sense that a lot of people are asking the political system to accomplish things for them that are really outside the scope of public policy. There’s an awful lot that can be achieved with policy — cleaner water or more housing or higher living standards for poor kids or a more growth-friendly tax code — but there’s a lot that can’t really. I think various aspects of modern life are making people feel anxious and sad and they are to an extent taking it out on the world by adopting radical (for a while radical left, but now increasingly radical right) political opinions rather than trying to find more intellectual and emotional fulfillment in their actual life.

From youth swim to Wuthering Heights

It all started with my son joining a swim team this fall. We’re not big believers in high-pressure youth sports, but he’s always loved swimming, so we signed him up for the most low-key program we could find. Still, it involved two evening practices every week for the entire school year. And while there’s no particular requirement for parents to sit in the bleachers while practice is happening, there also isn’t anywhere else especially convenient to wait.

This is where I did a lot of my novel reading¹ this year.

It’s also where I got to be friends with the father of one of my kid’s swim buddies. He told me about his involvement with something called the Catherine Project, which was founded in 2020 by a philosopher and Saint Johns College tutor named Zena Hitz and focused, like Saint Johns itself, on the great books. They have a core program focused on the classics plus wider-ranging general seminars.

He said he was leading a seminar where they read Hammurabi’s Code and other ancient legal texts, which sounded delightfully weird. When I browsed the catalog over the spring, a lot of their offerings, frankly, sounded awfully daunting, but I did find an eight week seminar on Wuthering Heights.²

It was the perfect intersection of a programming format I was interested in exploring and a book that had landed on my list through a kind of random walk through woman-authored 19th-century English novels. I signed up for the summer session, which was a perfect pretext for hitting pause on reading Victorian novels and so I could read a couple of books about Proto-Indo-European, plus John McWhorter’s new book on pronouns, and also just spend less time reading because the Knicks were in the playoffs.³

The internet has upside

I’m not an internet hater or a luddite, I’ve obviously made my whole career in digital media and have tried very hard to be at the forefront of certain technological changes like blogging, Twitter, and subscription newsletters. And way before any of that stuff, I liked to argue about politics on Prodigy forums using dial-up. Even before we had dial-up, I’d read Ender’s Game — a book in which enthusiastic young posters save the world⁴ via online political takes — so I dived right into that universe.

But over the years I’ve become pretty disgruntled about the actual social and political impact of digital technology. Something that I hoped would bring people together and make us more connected has, in practice, mostly done the opposite.

Participating in this seminar felt like a corrective against moving into pure crank mode about this.

It would obviously be pretty easy for me to find some kind of IRL book club or reading group in DC. But the nature of the scale and sorting power of the internet is that I was able to find something that was incredibly finely targeted at exactly what I was in the market for. Meanwhile, it struck me that a very large share of the participants in my group are people who live in smaller towns where, by definition, there aren’t as many options locally.

This was really the original promise of the internet: helping people transcend the limits of physical space to form connections with other people around ideas and interests. It has, I think, mostly not worked out that way, but not because it can’t work out that way — the technology really does have the power to accomplish the optimistic things that we hoped it would achieve. It also does occur to me that short-term and long-term effects can be hard to disentangle in the moment. The Gutenberg Bible was printed in the middle of the 15th Century, and it took several hundred years for the diffusion of knowledge and mass literacy unleashed by movable type printing to start generating sustained increases in living standards. A more proximate effect was to destabilize elements of the European religious and political order in ways that led to multiple rounds of religious war, culminating in many millions of deaths.

But it did work out for the best in the end.

Be the change you want to see in yourself

I’m trying not to spoil the book for myself, but to the best of my knowledge, Wuthering Heights doesn’t have any major social or political themes.

But several of the Victorian novels that I’ve read that do have such themes, like Shirley and Eliot’s Felix Holt, sort of surprised me in their treatment of the issues around the Industrial Revolution. These books are clear-eyed about the problems resulting from Britain’s unprecedented economic modernization in the first half of the 19th century. But Brontë is very focused on a kind of personalistic moral reform as the solution, sympathizing in a humane way with Luddites, but ultimately suggesting that the needed change is for industrialists to be more honorable people rather than any kind of systematic reform.

Eliot, meanwhile, is overtly skeptical of big political reform agendas, which she seems to think are fine on the merits but also unlikely to deliver the gains that their proponents desire. Her thing is that people need to actually become more moral for anything to be fixed, which is part of what motivated her career change from magazine editor to novelist.

Ten years ago, I would have hated these kinds of ideas.

But I’ve been really struck watching the rise of Trump, the backlash to Trump, the backlash to the backlash to Trump, and now the unfolding of Trump 2.0, that everyone in American politics is struggling with the mismatch between voters’ deeply felt desire to overthrow the system and their practical aversion to almost every kind of actual policy change. That’s not to say that there are no real problems in America or no need for change to address those problems. But I think that if you attempt to look at these things even slightly objectively, you’ll see quickly that the level of public anger with the status quo is wildly out of proportion to the level of public support for specific major changes to public policy. Almost nobody wants to pay the higher prices that the MAGA vision of high tariffs and mass deportation would entail, or the higher taxes of a transition to social democracy.

And that’s fine. I think it’s easy to see why people don’t particularly want those things, and it’s also easy to see why residents of a country with extremely high living standards would be pretty averse to dramatic change.

What you don’t see is many people articulating risk-aversion and comfort with the status quo as an overt political identity. Instead, everyone is extremely mad and wants to overthrow the establishment. And the establishment, to be fair, has made its share of mistakes. But I really don’t think you can make sense of contemporary politics without acknowledging that a lot of what is making people feel miserable and anxious is less a change in policy conditions and more the growth of social isolation. People are spending less time with friends and family and more time online. Online, they’re marinating in negativity-inflected news, PRC propaganda, and invidious interpersonal comparisons on social media where you can never be beautiful enough or rich enough to go toe-to-toe with influencers.

There are things we can do policy-wise to mitigate these trends. But I also think that we need a cultural shift toward people being more mindful about what they do with their time. This exchange Milan had recently with a pseudonymous leftist reflects how I feel about a lot of contemporary takes on both the left and the right.

I don’t know that therapy is per se the right answer for everyone. Or, rather, what I think most people need out of therapy is some concrete suggestions for trying to do something different in their own lives that can make them feel a little more grounded and a little less emotionally fragile in the face of life in a large country where people disagree about politics. I don’t know that joining reading groups about old books is the answer for everyone, but you ought to try something.

1. I resolved to spend more time doing sustained reading of fiction this year. That’s meant continuing to keep on top of my beloved Jack Reacher series and Michael Connelly’s books, plus I’ve read a lot of Agatha Christie mysteries, but I’m also trying to tackle more serious fare.

2. I have sort of a completist’s temperament, so after I read Middlemarch and liked it, I read all George Eliot’s other books. Then I read the Jane Austen books (other than Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility, which I’d already read). At that point it felt like the theme was “19th century female English novelists,” so I read Jane Eyre, and then I read Charlotte Brontë’s other novels, Shirley and Villette. It seemed like Emily Brontë was next in line.

3. Unlike the rest of the ideas in this post, getting emotionally invested in a long shot NBA playoff run is not recommended behavior for improved mental health and peace of mind.

4. Arguably some stuff also happens with military training and space battles.