Hazel Mousley loves book clubs. She says she is manic about them.
She has organized and run seven of them in Nelson over the past four years: some fiction, some non-fiction and some a mix.
Most them are time-limited (maximum one year) and they are themed. Each club has different members, although there is some overlap. For each one she has complex criteria by which she chooses the books.
Currently she has four clubs on the go: Women in Genre Fiction, World History, The Co-op Book Club (exclusively for staff at the Kootenay Co-op where she works), and a less defined one that she calls My Regular Book Club.
Previously she’s run Local History, Art Criticism, and Women in Translation.
“She has started something incredible and unstoppable,” says Julia Cedar, who has taken part in many of Mousley’s clubs. “There are so many excuses to not take the time to read … yet she pushes people to find the time to read and gather.”
Mousley’s clubs are meticulously organized and intellectually challenging.
“I like things to be systematic and prioritized,” she says. “It takes let’s say 15 hours to read a book. You might as well make sure that choice is a good one. You don’t want to leave that to chance.”
So she puts a lot of energy into curation and organization.
Her Women in Translation book club, for example, featured “the most critically acclaimed books written by women not in English.” Those titles were chosen mostly by Mousley after hours of research, with a bit of help from members of the new club. Then she and its members voted to choose the top 12 for the year.
The result was a mix of mainly fiction from South Korea, Austria, Quebec, Russia, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, and more.
Mousley’s process for choosing the books for her Women in Genre club (genre fiction written by women) was more complex. She divided the range of books into categories — romance, thriller/suspense, mystery, fantasy, science fiction and horror, some of them with sub-categories.
She analyzed the market share of genre categories and sub-categories and invented a “rational algorithm” so that the list represents types of genre books in the proportion that they are read and sold.
But it’s deeper than that, and this is where Mousley’s self-professed mania comes in.
“A big element of genre fiction was readability. I used Goodreads to find books with ratings of four or five out of five: that would represent how much of a page turner they were, and that is a critical element of genre fiction.
“I also made sure that they had over 30,000 reviews, to make sure it represents what people are interested in, and I also made sure that I had books representing every decade of the past two centuries.”
The result is the book club that she’s most proud of.
“So many people read genre fiction, but in general they read only their favourite genre. But to do this really organized tour of genres I feel like we are learning about our humanity with stories that represent different types of emotional experiences.
“Genre books themselves are typically easy to read so it just frees up a lot of intellectual space for the participants to then look at the architecture of these novels and stories with more intellectual rigour.
“We leave at the end of an evening just exhilarated and proud of ourselves, bonded and looking forward to the next one.”
Cedar says it takes a lot of work to keep a club going when there is no wine or food involved.
“It also takes a lot of boldness and tenacity to keep people on the reading schedule, order enough copies on time … etc. I like also that aspect, being completely taken care of by our book club master Hazel.”
Multiple Mousley book club member Anna Purcell says, “When she decided to start a book club she knew she didn’t want to just hang out and drink wine with people whether they had read the book or not, so she set about … researching club formats online and came up with the structure we still have today, barring a few tweaks. The result is uniquely formal, with metrics we’ve been charting for a few years now.”
Mousley says that most fiction book clubs are populated by women reading books by men.
“But a big part of my passion is to discover works of genius written by women.”
Her non-fiction book clubs tend to attract mostly men and she has mixed feelings about that because “my focus is on women overcoming being intimidated by certain intellectual territory.”
It was her own intense desire for learning that initially inspired her book clubs.
“When I left university I felt, oh gosh, now I am a cog in the machine for the rest of my life and that excitement of learning and living life fully was over.”
The book clubs bring that excitement back.
“The thing I like best about the them is they are strategically and systematically pulling me out of my ignorance and stagnation.”
She is passionate about sharing that excitement with others, especially women, who she says get “bogged down with the domestic, especially mothers.”
Purcell likes Mousley’s unique interest in self improvement.
“When I first met her she had a night-walking club and a culture club, and was holding regular geography parties and grammar parties where people played games designed to improve their abilities in those areas. As someone with a bit of a nerdy streak myself, I was smitten.”
Mousley has two new book clubs in the works.
“One is a birding book club,” she says. “Memoirs of birders, books about birds, fiction about birds.”
The other is about women and narration. It will explore different narrative voices and points of view, in books written by women.
“Narrative voice is the hardest thing to discuss, the most invisible to people, the most ephemeral, but also hugely important.”