Posted 2 years ago
6 tips for what makes a good book club
Last Fall I decided to start a new book club focusing on books that were not so challenging to read that they wanted to make me poke my eye out with a stick.
This was all precipitated by the post traumatic stress of trying to slog through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as part of Infinite Summer (10 pages a day for 3 months and voila, you’d have finished IJ— or nearly killed yourself in the process).
Needless to say, my Infinite Jest Book Club, which got off to a roaring start, trickled down to almost nothing by the end of summer. Whether people felt bad about showing up because they hadn’t read, or because they had completely lost interest, I’ll never know. I suspect a bit of both.
After that experience I knew my next book club had to be different. For the past few months, the new and improved book club has been going strong. Here are a few pointers I’ve learned along the way:
1. Know what kind of book club you are. We started calling it the “Books that don’t want to make me poke my eye out with a stick” Book Club because we were focused on reading books that were not so challenging or daunting that half our members would drop out.
2. Make it manageable. Whatever we read, we give about 5 weeks for everyone to get the book, read it and come ready to discuss.
3. Book selection is a privilege. We only allow members that attend the meeting to offer book suggestions and vote on what to read next. That both builds in an incentive to attend the book club and ensures that people that are most active get their voice heard.
4. Go with the flow. We’ve found that our book club has a leaning towards sci-fi — and all totally inadvertently. All of our selections have included an element of sci-fi (Cloud Atlas, Watchmen, City and the City, Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao). Undoubtedly this is because we’re all total nerds. We’ve made a conscious decision to mix it up for the next book club and are reading Dahl’s “My Uncle Oswald”, which if anything falls more into the “soft porn” arena!
5. Keep it moving. We’ve held our book club at different members houses each month. It creates a sense of ownership and responsibility in the book club and keeps everyone involved.
6. Grow, grow grow. We do have some core members of the book club, but we also invite friends who may be interested in that month’s book to join. Fresh faces each month means new ideas and perspectives that are invaluable to the quality of our meetings.
