Often people will search for book club suggestions online looking for lists of suggested reading, but really what they’re looking for is guidance for how to run a book club well. This particular post will offer book club suggestions in the realm of how to talk through the books you’ve read: specifically what do they mean?

Featured Download: The ultimate list of book club suggestions — dos and don’ts.

Recently I joined what an author friend of mine calls “varsity book club” here in New York: they meet alternately in the New York Times building and the World Trade Center and have met continually for fifteen years. The group features many interesting folks with whom I’m honored to spend some time discussing last month’s read, but both the book and the manner in which the group discussed the book betrayed something about the way we interpret literature as a society in our current historical era.

The book was Alice Hoffman’s THE RULES OF MAGIC, which, based on the title, is either extremely ambitious or extremely unambitious, either hubristic (if she intends to declare legislation on “all magic,” a role that God alone could fill) or hypocritical to the point of irrelevance (for nowhere in the book do we find any significant system of rules or anything like a magic system as you might find in any of the great current fantasy writers, something she and many of her magical realism peers may have noticed if they actually read the tradition to which they claim to be contributing).

In any case, we’ll get to the book in a moment. For now I want to talk about the sort of discussion we had because I feel it exposes what passes for literary reflection in our modern era. And I want to be careful because none of my colleagues and peers are here to defend themselves, so I prefer to broaden this piece to include any number of more literary book clubs I have both joined and started over the last ten years in New York, Joplin, Detroit, San Diego and elsewhere. The key word in that last sentence being “started” : I’m the worst hypocrite when it comes to propagating this error and I hope in writing this I can begin to course correct. I guess in light of my failure, the best book club suggestion is to start one or join one and see where it leads…

When we read a novel these days, we tend to only evaluate it on one or maybe two levels of interpretation. Depending on the composition of the group, we tend to only focus on the literal or the moral meaning. Most groups favor one of these meanings, but very few include both. Almost none include the other two possible levels – allegorical and anagogical – and when a book club does favor these things, they do so at the expense of other modes of interpretation. You may stumble upon a group of ale-quaffing medievalists who love to allegorize but forget that certain things actually happened in the novel. You may find a group of classical or Buddhist metaphysicians who love anagogical meaning but forget to let a book change their morals for the better. You may discover a book club made entirely of psychologists who love to deal with problems and morals and traumas but who forget that they make some of their declarations not as psychologists, but as amateur philosophers — a deeper reflection with a better guide through the anagogical meaning might help them there. This selectivity and favoritism for strands of meaning leaves the modern discussion about books thin, anemic, and vapid. As Stephen King said, any good book should stand up to two readings: one for the heart and one for the head. More accurately, a great book should stand up to four: heart, hands, head, and spirit. To discuss, then, what a book means we need to know how anything could mean anything at all. And the meaning of anything is first and foremost the meaning of everything. Everything has at least four meanings.

Featured Download: The ultimate list of book club dos and don’ts.

Four Book Club Suggestions for Exploring Meaning:

1. The literal (or heart): what it is, what it does. What actually happened and, arguably, how it made you feel.
2. The moral (or hands): how it changes us and our minds and praxis, how it teaches us something new.
3. The allegorical (or head): deals in types and symbols and signs and how they correspond to and echo key moments in our life, human history, and what it means to experience existence such as in the mythologies of the world. Myths and allegories often blur lines with one another, but though there is a key difference between symbols and allegories, they still belong together in the interpretive space simply because, for instance, to interpret Harry Potter as merely an allegory is to miss out the beautiful particularity of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, which has almost zero symbolic weight beyond what it obviously is as a real candy in the story.
4. The anagogical (or spirit): deals in ultimate reality, philosophy, and  metaphysics.

Books as both objects and artifacts of reason and imagination operate on all four simultaneously and a good book won’t simply stand up to a couple of readings but will stand up to a near infinite number of readings: that’s why we study them in universities, in large groups, and why some folks will dedicate their entire lives to one text.

So in a book like The Rules of Magic, the discussion went as most discussions go in modern book clubs: they talked about the author’s intended meaning, about what really happened in the book, and once in awhile condemned Hoffman for moralizing. That is to say we talked about whether or not someone could swim that deep in turtle pond in Central Park, how fast a pedestrian can walk from one neighborhood to another in Manhattan, and whether Hoffman has anyone in her life who’s poor or underprivileged. These sorts of questions ultimately take a deconstructive posture towards a given book (however much I love the question about Hoffman and her characters’s privilege). Deconstruction works completely against both poetic faith and the suspension of disbelief: if these are the only questions I’m interested in asking when I read a novel, then I’m not really interested in playing the game of fiction, I’m disinterested in what’s happening, I may well even be ignorant of how fiction even works. Ultimately these questions call into question the literal meaning in the same way that kittle pitchering lets the audience play keep away from a bad oral storyteller in Little Egypt, Illinois: to constantly nitpick over details is to not even allow the literal meaning to wash over us and affect our emotions. Of course great writers make this easy for us, but I’m not talking to writers today. I’m talking to readers (even if some of you readers also write). And the best readers can immerse themselves deeply into the worst texts.

The opposite, of course, is to simply accept that Hoffman’s writing fiction: she said these things happened and so they happened. There’s a great moment in the book Of Other Worlds where a scientist named Haldane accused C.S. Lewis of lying to the public by populating the canals on Mars with intelligent life. Lewis’s response was basically, There seems to be a misunderstanding: I’m writing fiction. For a more direct quote:

“The Professor has caught me carving a toy elephant and criticizes me as if my aim had been to teach zoology. But what I was after was not the elephant known to science but our old friend Jumbo.”

The moment we accept the fiction as fiction and immerse ourselves and agree that what happened happened, another hurdle rises up: some of the group criticized Hoffman for moralizing by using YA as a pejorative term. I’ve pointed out the folly of this elsewhere, but for now we’ll talk about the meaning of the moral: this is the place where we ultimately reject or accept that author’s main premise or even extract a premise better than the one they intended. For instance, the moral of Game of Thrones is that heroes are always monsters or losers and monsters are always heroes. I reject that premise outright for the same reason I reject books that claim the good guy always wins: it’s naive. One of the better book clubs I participated in would take even books the whole group unanimously hated and find ways to become better people through meditating on the moral. Mrs. Scheuermann contributed a great sea to that club. As MacDonald once pointed out, a good man can extract a good moral from even the most evil book and an evil man can extract the worst lies even from the greatest story. All stories first demonstrate and then prove points without explaining them – and it’s not just McKee who believes that, all of the great storytellers of history have assumed as much, whether willingly or unwillingly. We need not be Aesop. We need not explicitly say, “The moral of the story is…” in order to process through how a novel might change our lives for the better. It’s simply the practice of good, teachable, reflective people to try to learn and change for the better from everything they encounter.

Featured Download: The ultimate list of book club suggestions — dos and don’ts.

But ultimately, even if we accept the literal story without deconstructing it and we accept the moral (or extract some higher moral) without insulting the novel for having one (since all novels do), we’re still slaves to the biases of our era. An obsession with constructing and deconstructing someone else’s literal rendition of a story is a hanger-on from modernity. And moral problems come to us from our psychology-saturated corporate confession booths. It’s not to say that these two don’t matter: certainly what happens in the story happens and certainly moral problems and trauma and fatal flaws exist and require recovery. These two modes simply remain insufficient when two other interpretive modes wait in our arsenal, ready to be wielded.

Every book – not simply allegories – has an allegorical or symbolic meaning. Of course people talk about themes and symbols in literature classes and book clubs and in other posts on basic book club suggestions, but they tend to come at such things with an ear for sounding smart and an eye for looking prestigious. Very, very rarely do you encounter a reflective reader these days who digs into the hidden meaning of a book in order to be changed from the inside out. Because that’s what symbols do – that’s what language does – is point beyond itself and therefore for those reflecting upon them, point beyond themselves to something bigger. Half the fun of Harry Potter isn’t that Harry kissed Cho (literal) or that love conquers death (moral), but to puzzle out what it means for a famous orphan to delve into a toilet in order to fight a basilisk in the presence of a phoenix. Half the fun of To Kill a Mockingbird or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Till We Have Faces is to puzzle out the meaning of the titular lines: how do these symbol systems echo with the deep and meaningful experience and consciousness and bliss we’ve already encountered? How do they embolden the greatest parts of us? How do they make us long for more encounters such as these? How do symbols make us better?

And then there’s the anagogical: how the book deals with ultimate reality. Because there’s not only what happened, which requires poetic faith or at least the suspension of disbelief to enjoy. There’s not only the various morals we can extract in order to solve problems and change our minds. There’s not only the symbolic interpretation which echoes the meaningful experience we’ve had elsewhere in our lives and history and the myths of old. There’s also an ongoing dialog with ultimate reality. Certainly the likes of Hugo and Dostoevsky and Robinson more easily invite such readings, but so do Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett and Steinbeck –particularly when he was channeling the Burns poem. The anagogical meaning points to the final cause of man, the point of it all, the base level reality holding up a world in which novelists and their novels even exist at all. The novelists who do this the best have irrevocably influenced the philosophers: didn’t Plato fear the poets enough to kick them out of his republic? Don’t most tyrants do as much? Novelists and storytellers ultimately reframe our understanding of reality over and over again and getting at the undergirding metaphysical systems behind a good story is one way to not only get at the meaning of a the story at hand but also to get at the meaning of all stories and this world in which stories happen. The best example of this is the authorial chronology of Chesterton’s published works as observed in Gary Wills’s biography: every time that man wrote some sort of major philosophical or journalistic work, he only did so after he’d already embodied the ideas in story and poem. Sometimes we process even our hardest and deepest thoughts not first with a syllogism, but with a tall tale.

The only way to do that as a reader is to shape your book club in a way that sits at the feet of the author – even if, for instance, they title it The Rules of Magic when there’s NO magic system ANYWHERE, brush over the statutory rape of a young boy, or caricature entire systems of thought and historical epochs through cardboard cutouts. Sit at their feet, even at your literary enemy’s feet, and learn all you can.

For the point of reading great stories is not to become richer or smarter or more powerful or cooler or sexier.

The point of reading great stories is to let stories make us better: better lovers, better dreamers, folk filled with the kind of joy and justice a good and vibrant civilization requires.

Take and read.

And once you’ve read, take and reflect.

And once you’ve reflected, let the reflection make you better and take you deeper.

Featured Download: The ultimate list of book club suggestions — dos and don’ts.