There comes a point in every friendship ecosystem when someone suggests starting a book group. It\u2019s a beautiful moment, the platonic modern equivalent of the 1950s \u201cshall we go steady?\u201d It means you want to see one another at least every six weeks, preferably on a fixed day in the calendar, so that when someone tries to pinch that day for another, less interesting thing, you can in perpetuity reply: \u201cI can\u2019t, I have book group.\u201d Since nobody ever disbands a book group, it is adult\u2011speak for \u201cfriends for ever\u201d, which, if you stare at it hard enough, is almost tearjerking.<\/p>\n
So, anyway, this poignant moment arrived with my newish friends R and S, then immediately hit the road hump that none of us wanted to read a book. Nothing against books, guys, it\u2019s just I am generally reading something weird\u00a0that I wouldn\u2019t want to impose on you. S suggested a poem group; R nixed that. I said maybe we could read Poems on the\u00a0Underground<\/a> while we were on\u00a0the underground on our way to\u00a0the poem group. That\u00a0was nixed,\u00a0too.<\/p>\n R, scratching for something shorter than a poem, shorter even than a poem on the tube, suggested a text group: we get together and read each other\u2019s problematic texts. Is this passive-aggressive or aggressive-aggressive, or have I misunderstood completely? Does \u201cI\u2019ll see you soon\u201d mean they\u2019ll see me soon? What does this emoji mean? Yes, yes, I know what a heart is, but why is it yellow? Who would like to see this relationship breakdown in 312 parts? Can you believe what my sibling has said? Well, you have to, it\u2019s right here in\u00a0black and white.<\/p>\n The only foreseeable flaw is that once every six weeks won\u2019t be\u00a0anything like frequent enough.<\/p>\n Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There comes a point in every friendship ecosystem when someone suggests starting a book group. It\u2019s a beautiful…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":627963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-627962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/627963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}