Au Revoir, Madame Bovary

The New York City Atheists book club can take six months to get through an assigned reading.

“There is an intellectual masturbation going on here,” said Ken Bronstein, the garrulous leader of the NYC Atheists, who hosts the group’s book club at his Upper East Side home at 79th Street. On the second Sunday of every month, after the regular brunch meeting of 50 or 60 atheists (mostly retirees and a few politically minded young ’uns), about a dozen or so break off and take the M31 bus to Mr. Bronstein’s home and dissect a chosen book, chapter by chapter. Recent pick: Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, which has a pretty self-explanatory title. So far, the group has held passionate discussions about evolution, creationism and four-eyed fish. “Now, maybe that doesn’t turn you on,” Mr. Bronstein said. “But, to me, I love this stuff, okay? Forget about being an atheist or something, it’s just so interesting I don’t want to sleep.”

It’s nothing new for New Yorkers to stay up all night reading. But today, with television in a major slump, winter doldrums having yet to lift and the ever-present need for small community in a big city, book clubs are booming. We’re not talking about friends using Pride and Prejudice as an excuse to get tipsy and nibble cheese at someone’s brownstone. These new book clubs are focused, specialized and meant to bring like-minded strangers together. Are you a “foodie”? A secular humanist? Do you practice yoga? Have a coral reef fish tank? Then there’s a club for you!

“People get excited about [the book club] because they know they’re not going to sit there and just talk about some beautiful flower or something,” explained Mr. Bronstein. “There’s something you go away with, they’re like, ‘Hey, now I understand something,’ That’s great.”

Beyond bringing together kindred spirits, a specialized book club also means a narrower pool of books to choose from, which is a good thing. Experts at Books in Print publisher R. R. Bowker estimate that there are about 300,000 new books published each year. How do you know which ones are worth reading, anyway? Browsing the stacks of a Barnes & Noble or the Strand can make you never want to read again. As Barry Schwarz argues in The Paradox of Choice: Why Less Is More, excessive choice can make you question your decisions before you even make them (Nabokov or Marquez? Hitchens or Dawkins?) and set up unrealistically high expectations, leading to perceived failure and “decision-making paralysis.” Then you might not want to read any books at all! That’s why Oprah Winfrey’s book club is so popular. She makes all the decisions for you.

Elaine Lynn has attended a few NYC Atheists’ book club meetings and runs the Secular Humanist Society of New York’s Book Club, which meets once a month at the Community Room of the Muhlenberg Branch Public Library. She has been part of the more generalized Jersey City Book Club and the Union Square Book Meet-Up. “Often they want to read novels, which I’m not against, I read them, too, but it’s not the case that every book that month is something I’d want to read,” Ms. Lynn told The Observer. In other words, she gets more out of her niche clubs.

“The hyper-specialization is a reflection of the rest of the culture,” said Kathleen Rooney, author of Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America. “We have so much choice now, you can go into a coffee shop and ask for whatever kind of latte with whatever kind of milk, you can do your soy or skim or sugars. You can get whatever you want.” Oprah’s book club helped millions of Americans rediscover a love for reading that was squandered in high school. Reading was homework, and books were tested on.

“You could just join Goodreads [an online social networking service that keeps track of what your friends are reading], but that’s not enough,” Ms. Rooney explained. “You don’t get brunch with Goodreads or gossip with Goodreads. … Reading itself, it’s a very solitary and intimate act between you and the author; someone you may not meet, someone dead, dead for 100 years. But with book clubs you can share your ideas or feelings about what you’re reading. The book club revival, part of it, is a response to people wanting to actually interact with each other face to face.”