Article courtesy of: Terry Carson

Early in the Fall of 2021 some VRMNC members began to explore the idea of starting a history book club. The idea began to take shape during our Monday morning walks with the Ramblers Hiking Group. While walking we would range over many topics — politics, travel adventures, interesting television documentaries, Netflix suggestions, and books. Among our conversations, the topic of history was a regular theme. It was at this point that the idea of forming a history book club began to form.

And why not? We enjoyed reading history. Many of us already had a nodding acquaintance with book clubs through our spouses. Women seemed to join book clubs, men not so much. Nevertheless, getting a group of men together to discuss history books seemed to be a pretty straightforward matter of selecting interesting titles and establishing suitable times and places for our meetings.

 An invitation went out through the VRMNC Newsletter. In the invitation I defined history books very broadly to include not only the standard narratives of historical events, but also historical fiction, biographies, memoirs and other forms of writing about the past. The response was immediate and enthusiastic. To make book club discussions manageable we originally decided to set a limit of ten members. We quickly reached capacity and had to start a wait list.

 At our first get together we established a schedule, agreeing to meet on the second Wednesday of each month to discuss a selected book. Each member would take his turn serving either as a discussant or the host for a given meeting. The discussant would provide a brief summary of the book as well as a set of focus questions for discussing the book. Questions were sent out a week or so in advance. The host would be responsible for preparing the meeting venue and the refreshments.

Choosing the books at our first meeting proved to be a lively affair. Individual members proposed various books, authors and topics. As the conversation went on, it quickly became apparent that it would be premature to select all ten books for our first year of operation. So we agreed on just the first four:

Erik Larson (2011), In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.

Ken Follett (2010), Fall of Giants.

Richard Rhodes (2015), Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made.

Mary Beard (2015), SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.

We felt that these titles would be sufficient to get us going, and would allow space for the remaining six book club members to propose their selections for later in the year.

Waiting to choose the next six books turned out to be a wise decision. None of us had ever belonged to a book club before, so we made some rookie mistakes with our first four selections. For example, Fall of Giants described the events surrounding World War I through the experiences and interconnections of several German, Austrian, British, Russian and American families. It was a sprawling, multi-layered and well-told story, proving to be an outstanding example and a satisfying work of historical fiction, but it was nearly 1000 pages long. We decided that a maximum of 400 pages would be a more reasonable length for future selections.

Availability was another criterion. We arrived at this insight after scouring the public library and used bookstores for Hell and Good Company. While we might agree that the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War was an important event shaping modern European history, we really had difficulty actually finding the book.

 At this point, we began to take more careful note about what others had been saying about the practicalities of book clubs — those who were more experienced in the ways of these organizations. It seemed we were only able to learn these lessons after having made our own mistakes.

 And while a book’s length and availability were important pragmatic considerations for our selections, we encountered a third issue — what were the values and biases underpinning our choice of books? Simply put, we entered into a debate about whether it was better to go into further depth with early 20th Century European history (implied in the selection of the first three books), or should we be looking at other times and different places in history? As Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens remarked, “history has a wide horizon of possibilities”. Ought we to limit ourselves so narrowly — just to 20th Century Europe, in our book choices? Or should we go further afield?

Our fourth book, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, provided an impetus for a broader exploration of times and topics. SPQR invokes recent archeological findings and fresh interpretations behind Rome’s success in dominating the ancient world over many centuries. The observations we drew from discussing Mary Beard’s book helped us to select some of the remaining six books:

Maria Rosa Menocal (2002), The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain.

Lars Brownworth (2010), Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Civilization.

Yuval Harari (2014), Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

Jonathan Manthorpe (2019), The Claws of the Panda: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada.    

Stephen Bown (2020), The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire.

Harald Jahner (2022) Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich (1945 – 1955).

Both the Menocal and Brownworth books deal explicitly with the aftermath of what has been traditionally regarded as the “fall” of the Roman Empire in the year 476CE. Through these offerings we came to appreciate that the Empire lasted, in some form, for much longer. On a completely different topic, Yuval Harari’s book offered us a stunning overview of the history of humankind over the past 70,000 years. Our next two books will deal with Canadian history and current affairs. And in our final book we shall return to postwar Germany.

We are now over six months into our History Book Club. It has been informative and filled with exciting ideas and insights. There are also hot debates and disagreements, but it’s all in the spirit of good fellowship and a shared interest in reading history.

– Terry Carson