Being a member of a book club has seen me read books that I:

• had wanted to for ages but hadn’t given myself the time,
• generally wouldn’t have even read the back cover, and / or
• perservered with to finish so I could contribute to the discussion

which is probably the main purposes of a book club anyway (aside from the social aspect of course).

We’re nearly at the end of our first six months having read across various genres. This was due to some great planning where we all nominated titles across six genres. The book titles were then drawn out by genre and whoever nominated that book would host and lead the discussion.

My turn finally arrived on Thursday. I’d nominated Wuthering Heights. I’d never read it or many other classics for that matter (I hadn’t read any Bronte novels until this one), I’d seen it nominated as one of Australia’s Favourite 100 Books (it comes in at number 13) and the Kate Bush tune was a little meaningless but haunting nonetheless.

I had wanted to buy an old version of the book but couldn’t find it anywhere. I considered an electronic version because I thought that would be a great way to read an old book. Instead, I purchased a tiny version with gold leaf pages that I often had to peel apart. I loved this – it made it seem like I was reading an old version which I though was fitting.

Over the month we read this book, emails were exchanged complaining about the writing style (particularly the phonetic spelling of Joseph’s conversations – the easiest way to understand was to read the words aloud, a technique that a number of us used), but pleased with the thin size of the book. Some loved it and were reading it for the billionth time.

Given the mixed emails, I knew I was going to have a tough crowd. There were few hardcore fans, some that seemed to think it was ok but a tough read and others who were pretty frustrated with some not even trying to read it, daunted that it is a ‘classic’. This also meant that there should be some great discussion, but it needed the right starting point.

I designed a test. It was multiple-guess and asked people to give their opinions on each character, relationship, setting in the book. Based on the number of As, Bs, Cs, or Ds, I had written a profile of each reader. Lucky for me, it was a hit (and surprisingly accurate) and turned out to be a great way to start the discussion (if I do say so myself!).

It had the added benefit of alleviating my boredom for 30 minutes at work that Thursday while I designed the quiz. The day had been a shocker and Catherine and Heathcliff were just what I needed to take my mind off things. I’d be hard-pressed to have a life as filled with drama as that!

* Thanks to Kate Bush for the title to this post.