“You’re in a book club?” my friend asked incredulously. “Why would you join a book club?”

I was a bit surprised to be asked this question by a friend who also happened to be a professor of comparative literature. We had known each other since college. We are both writers.  I had just told her that our next meeting would discuss Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a book she greatly admired. So why was it so odd to her that I was in a book club?

“I can’t imagine being in a book club,” she said. “That’s what I do for a living.”