Ask a Book Club: Nina Berman

Book clubs are full of passionate readers who go out and buy books throughout the year. They are always on the hunt for new titles to read, and are recommendation engines for the family and friends outside of the club. In Ask A Book Club, we help you better understand how book clubs find the books they read, and where they talk about books beyond their club. We look at individual book clubs to learn more about what they look for in a book and how groups of passionate readers come together to choose their titles.

We’re kicking off this series featuring NetGalley’s Communications Assistant, Nina Berman’s book club.

Photo Credit: Instagram @nnbrmn

Nina Berman’s Book Club: Brooklyn, NY

About the book club

We are group of 10 or so women in our mid-20s-30s living in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. Most of us work in creative industries, nonprofits, or are in graduate school. We meet every month at rotating members’ apartments. Most of us prefer to read physical books rather than e-books, although a few of us do read on Kindle. We celebrated our 1-year book club anniversary with mimosas and homemade cinnamon rolls in May.

While none of us are book reviewers, or book bloggers, we are book recommenders, book lenders, and book buyers. One of our members, Razi, shares the titles she reads on Kindle with her mother, and lends physical copies to her neighbor.

Reading scope

Like many book clubs, we tend to gravitate towards literary fiction and literary memoir. We did take a winter detour into True Crime, but have since returned to our wheelhouse. We are looking for books that help us experience the world through other perspectives, and books that help us reframe our own experiences.

To date, my book club has only read books written by women. This is not to say that we haven’t considered books written by men (Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and The Railroad by Colson Whitehead have both been previous nominations). But, we deliberately seek out titles written by underrepresented voices (especially queer voices, women’s voices, and POC voices) and our book club picks tend to reflect that, even though that is not the explicit focus of our club.

Finding new titles

We tend to find new titles from critics and influencers whose opinions and tastes we trust. We recommend books that our friends outside of the book club recommend to us.

For example, I suggested Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose because I had recently listened to an interview with her on the podcast, Another Round and remembered seeing a blurb about the collection in The New Yorker.

Other sources of inspiration include:

Nominating titles

Every month, we vote on three nominations. Two of those nominations come from rotating members of our club, and one of the nominations comes from the book club’s founder, Emily. We nominate books that we’ve been hearing a lot about, or that we have been meaning to read for a long time. Our lists tend to sway between well known authors who have been on our lists for a long time and authors whose names have been cropping up in the media we consume. When our imaginations fail us, we also have a shared Google Doc with titles we collected in the beginning of our book club. When the Google Doc becomes too lean, we add new titles that we have kept in the backs of our minds.

Most of our choices have been published within the past few years (South and West by Joan Didion and A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin) rather than the newest titles from the biggest publishing houses. These are the books that we just keep hearing about!

We also let our current book choices influence our future ones, wandering down paths of interest as they crop up organically. Essentially, we make our own comp lists. Last fall, after we read Too Much and Not the Mood, we recognized echoes of Maggie Nelson’s introspective essay style, so we read The Argonauts next. When we discussed which Maggie Nelson title to read, some of us suggested Jane: A Murder or The Red Parts, both of which deal with her aunt’s murder by a serial killer. Still wanting to pick up some true crime, the next title on the list after The Argonauts was the classic true crime tome, The Stranger Beside Me.

Recent reads

  • The Goldfinch (2013) by Donna Tartt, Little, Brown and Company
  • The Stranger Beside Me (1980) by Ann Rule, W. W. Norton & Company
  • The Argonauts (2015) by Maggie Nelson, Graywolf Press
  • Too Much and Not the Mood (2017) by Durga Chew-Bose, FSG Originals
  • Black Swans (1993) by Eve Babitz, Counterpoint

 

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A Writer’s Schedule: Stuart Evers

Today we’re talking to Stuart Evers, former bookseller and editor, and acclaimed author of Ten Stories About Smoking, which won the 2011 London Book Award, the novel If This is Home, and Your Father Sends His Love. He lives in London. He is also the Assistant Director of NetGalley UK.

Photo Credit: Pan Macmillan

How do you set your writing goals? Are they daily, weekly, etc?

The ideal is for there to be no goals or targets at all; to be writing with a complete ignorance of such outside-the-text pressures. Just picking up from where you left off: The words, the shape, the tone and the timbre so entwined that’s the only thing on which you concentrate. These moments are few and far between, however. Mostly I give myself long deadlines – a story, a chapter, a section finished by some time in the near future – and try to adhere to them. This has a moderate success rate. Otherwise, goals are sharp sticks with dubious carrots at the end – get a thousand words down and you can bathe the kids before their bedtime, get five thousand done by the end of the week and you can go to the pub. These goals are easily achievable – I always want to see my kids, I always want a beer on a Friday – but whether the work that stems from them is usable is something of a moot point.

Describe your routines as a writer and how they help you stay on track with your goals:

My routines are shaped by two vital factors, my job and my children. I write around these – before work,  when the kids are eating, and after they have gone to bed. I sometimes do an hour just before bed, and a few hours on the weekend while my wife looks after the boys. These twin commitments allow me to write, so they have to be treated with respect and priority, even if characters are screaming at me for some attention.

Photo Credit: Pan Macmillan

How did you develop your writing routines?

I’ve always had a job, so it’s always been the same for me: Snatched hours here and there; concentrating for short periods at a time; blocking out time on weekends and holidays. It is a necessity and I have got used to it. I’d love to be able to take the time to spend a day honing a sentence, but I suspect that even if I had that space, the sentence would be the same as the one I wrote originally.

What routines have you tried that didn’t work for you? Why didn’t they work?

I found that any very strict deadlines I set myself, I became resistant to. If I said that I absolutely had to finish a piece by a particular date, I would fail. A more generous deadline and I would beat it handsomely.

What do you do when you feel stuck?

I walk. Sometimes for some hours. I usually end up in a pub of some kind. Sometimes I just go off and write something else, other times I revisit writers I love to remind me that it can be done.

What compromises have you had to make in order to have time for writing?

I am less sociable than I once was. I once met David Mitchell and his advice to me was to halve my social life and buy a teapot. I already had the teapot.

Photo Credit: Pan Macmillan

Describe the balance between having a full-time job, family, and writing. How do you manage both?

They are all fun, all frustrating, all important – and they are all interdependent. The difference is that, for the most part, writing can wait. It is a kind of vital luxury – but it’s like some people are with exercise, if you’re not doing it, it can impact on other aspects of your life. So you always find the time.

How do you think about finding a job that supports you financially and supports your writing? Do you need something that leaves room in your mind for creative work, something that keeps you in the habit of deep thinking and frequent writing, something else altogether?

Most writers – certainly those who are in their forties like me – need a job. Even Zadie Smith has a day job. That means you need something that works for you. That can be something flexible, something stretching, or something that you hate, but gives you impetus. You’ll know the fit when you find it.

Tell us a little bit about the New Year’s resolution you made at the beginning of 2018 to help you keep on track with your writing goals.

My wife and I resolved to make Monday to Wednesday no television days, so I would write in the living room as my wife read on the sofa. It’s been a success – I’ve read more and written more than I’d expected and it’s been a very easy transition. It’s the kind of joy – having a partner who likes to read like you – that’s easy to take for granted.

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