What's the problem with a book club? People who like literature, coming together every so often to talk about the books they're reading. What on earth can be wrong with that? A lot, apparently, at least going by the reactions from various friends when I told them I was setting one up in Tel Aviv. I have to say that the venom surprised me. But what particularly interested me was the fact that the vitriol came particularly from people who had studied literature or who worked in some capacity in the publishing industry.

I didn't study literature, preferring the seemingly sexier option of history and international relations. But over the last year or two, for a variety of reasons, my reading has almost entirely shifted from non-fiction to fiction. In my excitement, I even considered applying for PhD programmes in English Literature. For now, though, I'm going to settle for my fortnightly book club, which I hope will develop into an opportunity for people passionate about novels to come together and develop a shared understanding of the text through dialogue.

As ways of passing the time go, it seems pretty harmless to me. So why the criticism? I think it comes from the same raw nerve that drives the traditional print media's mistrust of the blog. There's a deep discomfort at people doing things themselves, for fun, with little concern for profit or fame. "Professionals" are supposed to explain the world to us, and we are meant to pay them for the privilege. By writing a blog, we are cutting out the middleman, and that's a threat.

But book clubs are just talking-shops, not rivals to the Guardian Review. So why this particular antagonism? In the Review, novelist Rachel Cusk described her experience of joining a book club in her new town. What started out as an attempt to get to know new people became a disturbing insight into how most people read. "As if for the first time, I understood that reading is a private matter. In this atmosphere the spell was broken. What remained was a cold, unyielding surface for a writer's imaginings to fall upon: the permafrost of organised ambivalence." Cusk found fault with the group's predilection for using literature as a form of escape from "their ordinary experience of sorrow, of doubt, of morality, of time," in favour of books that "bore no relation to their own existence". Eventually, after an impassioned speech extolling the virtues of Chekhov, she left, deciding that her seriousness was not beneficial to the group.

Cusk's experiences are interesting, but they should be taken with a pinch of salt. It would be surprising if a serious, professional novelist like her would be stimulated by talking literature with people for who getting through one novel a month is a struggle. Such a group might not grab someone who has studied literature at university either. But that doesn't invalidate the enterprise. At the risk of earnestness, there's something really positive about people meeting up to talk literature, all the more so at a time when - for example - 40% of people in the US read one book or less last year.

I am writing this before our first meeting, when we'll be discussing Anne Enright's The Gathering. And I have no doubt that I'm not going to be stimulated by everyone's responses; some will downright irritate me. But that's to be expected; I'm sure it was the same for my friends who studied literature in their university seminars. Tolerance and patience will hopefully get me through. The point is that it's exciting to be able to spend time with people who are hopefully as passionate about literature as I am.

There's another critique, though, one I'm not so comfortable with. It's spelled out in an unpublished letter to the New York Review of Books by Amy Bellette in Exit Ghost:

"If I had something like Stalin's power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I'd forbid all public discussion of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals ... I'd outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare to speak to one another. I'd leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own."

This elucidates Cusk's notion of reading as a "private matter". If there's one thing that my shift from non-fiction to fiction has taught me, it's that literature is a humble, quietist activity, one that teaches you how to be comfortable on your own. A novel is written to be read, not to be discussed. Its elucidation is itself. I hope that, amid the chatter of the book club, this won't be forgotten. I'll keep you posted ...