The advent of the bookish night out feels like that rarest of things – progress
September 29, 2024 1:06 pm
I am rarely envious of the young. Have you seen the world out there? And they’ve got to live in it! For ages yet! In rented accommodation with strangers, for the most part, however much avocado toast-eating and latte-drinking they abstain from.
Just occasionally, however, they come up with something that makes me long to be able to join their cohort and take full advantage of the new discovery.
I did, in fact, do that with avocado toast. I often feel, as I shove my delicious mashed pear, salt, pepper, lemon juice and, if I’m feeling particularly fancy, poached egg on sourdough trencher down my grateful gullet that I really must find a young person and thank them. But their latest invention I can only yearn for from a distance. Do you know what they are doing now, the youth? They are having bookish nights out.
More and more venues, it seems, are offering the opportunity to go and read in company. Food and live music are often provided, along with readings from BookTok – the subset of TikTok that does so much these days to promote authors and drive sales through word-of-mouth travelling at lightning speed – influencers.
Can. You. Imagine? Actually, yes, I did imagine such a thing frequently from the ages of about 14 to 21 as my friends and I entered the drinking and clubbing years and, though I took to the former activity with alacrity because you could do it in peace AND it only made things more peaceful by obliterating the internal monologue that pursued me to exhaustion every day, the latter – dear God, no.
As the Edwardian actor Ernest Thesiger once said when asked to describe his time at the Front in the First World War: “My dear. The noise! The people!”
The point is, my dream of a night in which people would gather to enjoy themselves relatively quietly and take time out whenever they needed it to restore themselves by reading before hurling themselves back into the – gentle, considered – fray was just that; a dream. You couldn’t have it. It simply couldn’t be done. There was no merging of the streams.
Bookworms were bookworms, clubbers were clubbers and never the twain did meet. There was no middle ground and, crucially, no way of finding a critical mass of people who might be interested in forging one. You couldn’t go round questioning clubbers to see if any of them occasionally longed for a less extravagantly sociable night out/sort-of-in. They wouldn’t hear you over the music.
And you couldn’t ask bookworms the same because they were holed up in their bedrooms and their mums wouldn’t let you in, even if – especially if – you had a clipboard and a zealous glint in your eyes as visions of a better world danced behind them.
But one thing the age of the internet has done has allowed people to find their people. Usually this means niche perverts finding other niche perverts and all hell breaking loose but sometimes, just sometimes, it means nice things happening too. Like book nights. A genuine third way being found. Enough people saying to themselves and to each other “We have been siloed for too long! It need not be this way!” and bringing together two hitherto separate spheres and making a new – and possibly for many, even nicer – one.
And it feels like a revivifying kick against many pricks. It feels like we have got one over on the internet. Or at least it feels like we have got one over on the people who designed and who control the internet, so that it rewards fuelling rage and sowing the division that generates so many more clicks and so much more revenue than harmony does.
Here the people who previously fell forgotten between two stools are being picked up and given a comfy chair and a mini-literary festival for the night instead. Introverts can test the shallow waters of socialising instead of being flung headfirst into roiling seas, and extroverts can find out what it feels like to take the weight off your feet and if there’s any pleasure in being able to stop being so extra all the time (this is probably not the way they’d phrase it. But that’s okay. Their whole deal is that they will come up and explain their preferred alternative whenever they want. I don’t see why I shouldn’t have my way ‘til then).
All in all, the advent of the bookish night out feels like that rarest of things: progress. In a very, very small way, sure, but again I ask – have you seen the world?
Take these moments, these tiny instances wherever you find them, clutch them hard against your chest and believe that unity can still, against all the odds, be not just found but made anew.
