AntivirusGy 18: Reading with the book club in the pandemic..


Book club

3am, I can't sleep. I get up, collect the laptop, bring to the bed under the net. I open the PDF of the book. I want to sleep but I am glad that I can finish reading the book,  not only because the book is a kind of page turner but because well is book club that day and I want to finish the book.

I remember reading a Kafka's Metamorphosis the night before First book club meeting in 2005 and thinking what the hell , this is like school.. hustling up to finish assignment the day before it is due.

Reading is a wonderful solitary activity. Reading in community has this other dynamic of sustaining the joy in the encouragement and sharing.  

Pandemic

The pandemic has not stopped the reading in community. Thanks to the Internet, we can set some goals and then meet to talk about the book and the things in the book, or not to talk about the book at all and talk about other things - sex, politics, mental health, more sex, politics, environment, writing, films, other books..

March 2020 and things change. We can't meet up face to face any more. 

We had started thinking of meeting outdoors, in spaces which might be related to the theme of the book. Covid changed things.

We had our first 'free Zoom meeting' to be finished in 40 minutes. Some people couldn't get in. We then move to Skype for a few months, then settled on Google Meet. I am getting used to not seeing faces.

The Virtual meet up meant that we could connect with people who were not in Georgetown and so the community expanded to include people joining from outside Georgetown, and outside of Guyana. Some people do not join when there is no internet or electricity. There is a kind of privilege to being able to continue reading in community during the pandemic.

And since the exchange of paper books is not always possible, we are grateful for the er PDFs and ePUbs available from sources which have not been blocked as yet.

The Internet Archive is a wonderful source of books which can be borrowed.

I miss the paper books and passing around the paper book in the meeting. But now we can cut and paste from the PDF to the chat window as we talk.

I have a feeling we might continue to meet virtually for a long time after the virus passes. But it would be nice to meet in the spaces related to the books.

(AntivirusGy is a collection of ramblings on things which have changed since Covid 19 entered our vocabulary)

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