This was a pleasure to read although my view differs from yours in big ways, especially:

I'd separate the social benefits of book clubs (and those friendly relationships you rightly praise) from the harms they've done to American literary life now that they have become a primary driver (I've read "the primary driver") of book sales, including contributing to a dumbing-down of the culture.

My views are too complex for a comment, and I'll do a story on them someday: namely, when I stop writhing mentally about, say, the sexism in some courtrooms that still says female lawyers can't wear pantsuits (which I just wrote about instead of the piece I've long wanted to write on book clubs).

Suffice it to say: Come back to us in three years when you've been asked month after month to spend 8-to-10 hours a month reading books that aren't very good and you're the only one saying so. I'm in a great book club on Zoom that does one or two classic short stories a month (which gets around both the time and quality issues). But it's the rare exception to clubs I've belonged to, spoken to as a book critic, or heard about from friends.

If you hit the wall before three years: Try to persuade your club to read David Grann's The Wager, the summer's No. 1 nonfiction bestseller, the book many clubs should have been reading instead of Colleen Hoover.