Fight club: when book groups turn nasty

‘Small friendly village book club is looking for three or four new members.’ I was infuriated to read this in our village newsletter, an alternative to the parish magazine. I had just been ‘cancelled’ by this ‘friendly’ club from featuring at one of their evenings. A text, sent by a hitherto pleasant woman who’d liked my last book, explained: ‘There are many hurt feelings in the village. We in the book group believe that your email, put on the parish council notice board, was hurtful and upsetting. So the feeling is that at the moment it would be better to postpone your visit.’

‘Hurt’ seems to be a current buzzword for those who don’t share others’ views. My email had simply corrected the newsletter’s misreporting of a parish council meeting, where I had taken notes. The chair, who’d spoken reasonably and politely, had had her words altered to portray her as an autocratic bully. There was nothing ‘hurtful’ or ‘upsetting’ in my highlighting this. It was she who could have claimed ‘hurt’. (The newsletter’s editor, incidentally, published some of my email in the next issue as a correction.)

Book clubs can be fraught places. Personality clashes are common. I resigned from one years ago, fed up with the arrogance of a member who, when I’d chosen a memoir by a man whose elderly father lost the tenanted farm that had been in his family for generations, declared: ‘It’s not so tragic. They moved to a bungalow.’ That member lived in a valuable penthouse flat. I clashed with him again over Kazuo Ishiguro’s superb and haunting Never Let Me Go. ‘It’s not meant to be a documentary about cloning!’ I’d shouted after his silly objections about Ishiguro not concentrating on cloning techniques.