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By the way: The hungry heart’s weekend book club
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Organizing book clubs in Indonesia, a country where reading is not a popular activity, is no easy task. (Shutterstock/File)
Organizing book clubs in Indonesia, a country where reading is not a popular activity, is no easy task.
Yet, I consider myself lucky. Just by coincidence, my colleague, who worked in a publishing company, asked me to join her book club, called the Read, Sense and Listen Community, which she set up in 2015 with two of her friends.
I joined their first meeting in February that year at a Jakarta café, along with six other people. The theme was one’s dreams and aspirations, and we had to discuss books that covered the topic.
I discussed Czech author Milan Kundera’s 1984 book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, exploring how unrealistically high expectations could ruin our lives. I inserted my own stories in between, recounting the novel’s plotline, while using the story as a jumping-off point for me to talk about my own personal problems in front of these strangers.
Little did I realize that my decision to pour my heart out in between discussing Kundera’s keen eye for human existential crises triggered other book club members to also pour their hearts out, telling the forum their own life problems.
Most of us were born in around 1989 and aged around 25 years old at that time, dealing with our own so-called “quarter life crises” – which requires adults to formulate their own values amid the assault of superficial things that the industrial-capitalist society tells us we need to have in order to be happy (sorry, the writing got a little too cerebral here, but it is true).
We all expressed our disillusionment with society's pillars of success: social status, material things, wild romance and fame.
After each member of the book club expressed their anxieties on these issues, we told each other that, in the end, what mattered in life was our own passionate and diligent work to serve others to attain better lives, along with our commitment to always be kind to others.
And so a pattern had been set. More and more, young adult bookworms going through a quarter-life crisis began joining our book club in 2015, also expressing concerns on how many people had fallen prey to society's unrealistic and superficial demands and how we can instead always strive to achieve meaningful things and connect with other human beings.
The discussions always run deep. We are a support group, really, in addition to being an intellectual club. We undeniably nourish each others’ minds. I even get a lot of new title recommendations from my friends there.
But most importantly, we strengthen each other’s hearts to survive and cope in a sometimes-exciting, sometimes-harsh city called Jakarta.
Using books as a jumping-off point for our members to disclose their own personal problems is effective because, as we all know, people tend to be hesitant about launching into their personal problems straight away in front of strangers they have just met. Once the doors are open, it is clear just how lonely we all can be in the city.
As the years have gone by and most of the members have gotten older and we have (thankfully) resolved our quarter-life crises and made peace with ourselves and the world around us, we moved beyond our own tiny little lives to also discuss our concerns about the horrific sociopolitical turbulence that is plaguing the world right now.
I remember that, at some point in 2017, when Islamic radicalism seemed to be on the rise in Indonesia, we spent as long as six hours just exchanging our fears and hopes regarding what this country would become.
Over the years, the books that we read have also became more multidisciplinary, covering not only “escapist” literary fiction but also serious historical, political, economic and sociological accounts of the world.
The club is also a fertile ground for positive collaboration, such as when we collectively supported some club members' activism as volunteers on several occasions.
In February, we celebrated our fourth anniversary. Despite the heavy sociopolitical overtones of our book club, at its core it remains the same: a platform for bookworms and hungry hearts in Jakarta to express their love for books while supporting one another as we make our way through life’s difficulties and celebrate the good things that are happening in our lives. (ste)
