Going digital with the LMA book group

The long-running London Metropolitan Archives Book Group, which meets monthly to explore a range of London writing both fiction and non-fiction, leapt into the virtual space during the pandemic. It took a few tentative steps to make said leap, with experiments with discussion boards and social media along the way, but it eventually found its home on video-conferencing platform Zoom.

Claire Titley, LMA Book Group organiser, reflects on the experience, and looks at the wide range of books read.

Zoom suits our purposes for several reasons. Firstly, it’s used extensively for events which means that it has become familiar to many of us for work meetings, pub quizzes, and catching up with our families – we’re not asking people to learn to use new software. Within two or three events it was no longer necessary to guide people through the reaction tools, the chat bar, the all-important mute function. This familiarity allows us to focus on the discussion at hand, with minimal distractions (dogs, cats, other family members are accepted distractions under the circumstances).

The gallery view goes someway to replicate the experience of being gathered in one room. We keep a limit on numbers so that the event is manageable, but we can reach far more people than we could ever fit in LMA’s Huntley Room, where we used to meet – routinely up to three times as many.

Perhaps surprisingly for a group which focuses on London writing, we now have a wide geographic reach, and it is particularly satisfying to be able to take our sessions beyond the confines of Clerkenwell. As a result, the virtual Book Group is a new book group, which changes slightly each session.

There are some disadvantages, of course. For me, there’s something a bit nerve-wracking about addressing a screen full of tiny faces. It can be harder to extemporise and to use gesture, and it’s harder to read subtleties. In person, it is easier to let conversation breathe, but online a ten second break in the conversation can feel like hours.

We have had some interesting technical problems, and I have relied on the wisdom of colleagues to help when things don’t always go to plan. As a host, I’ve had to learn new skills - namely keeping an eye out on chat and emails while trying to guide discussion.

But there are many similarities with the physical meetings of old. While we have always had groups of regular readers, this group attracts people interested in specific books and writers, so we’ve always welcomed newcomers. We aim to be inclusive, and I like to be able to encourage people to read outside their comfort zone.

Our sessions cover our immediate reactions to books (loved it or hated it, for example) which we explore alongside personal reflection, wider commentary and even theoretical approaches. Our readers continue to push conversation in lots of different directions, and I find a good session is one where we come away with more questions than answers. Some traditions remain - a book that people don’t enjoy gets more discussion than a favourite.

We’ve read a range of titles in lockdown and I was conscious of our choices. Apocalyptic visions of London didn’t feel appropriate at a time when many of us were only just starting to process what was happening in late spring (China Mieville’s riotous but disturbing Kraken was shelved, and we’ll return to it another time). But I’ve also felt the need to reflect current events in our reading, if obliquely - we read Sam Selvon’s Housing Lark and Sara Collins’ Confession of Frannie Langton as a way of thinking about race and the city, while What Maisie Knew by Henry James and Vanity Fair by W.M. Thackeray both explore London society and the relationship between Britain and Europe. At the end of a year when London felt strange and new to us, we read Elizabeth Darnley’s anthology of weird and eerie London stories, entitled Into the Fog.

The hardest part of the physical Book Group to replicate is the display of original documents, which allowed readers to explore archive material in relation to the work we’d just discussed. I have been experimenting with a presentation of material at the end of the sessions, relying on digital sources during the lockdown period, but this will change as I gradually bring in more original material as we start returning to work on site.

The LMA Book Group is likely to remain online for the foreseeable future, our experiment with a virtual group showing us that there is an audience beyond London. If you’d be interested in attending, you can book for individual events via the LMA Eventbrite page.