My book club met in late December to select the books for 2012’s meetings. When the first group began a few years ago, we’d just email each other with a book title and meet at some point after we’d all read it. All, by the way, was three.
The group is much bigger now, and while we only have four to six people at most meetings, we clearly need better organization. After asking for ideas about best practices for an organized book group, we decided to select a year’s worth of books at one time, and to schedule the meeting dates. Since schedules fluctuate, we’re pretty easy about changing a date if needed, but we only had to do that a few times last year.
Since we have a private Facebook group, communication is easy. Neal is the only member not on FB, and I just give him whatever information he needs. A few weeks before we were to select books, I posted a bunch of lists. Since I’m militant about NOT reading crap, the lists are a useful jumping point. Here are some that I posted:
- Pulitzer Prize: Fiction
- 1001 Books to Read Before You Die
- MLA Top 100 Novels
- MLA Top 100 Non-fiction
Like most artwork lists, these are somewhat arbitrary, but they do help.
This year, I was asked to give “homework”: I assigned a list to a few group members, who each selected 3-5 books to bring to the group. At our meeting, everyone explains why they selected their books, and if anyone has read them, s/he adds feedback. After the book presentations, there’s a shuffling sort of time when we eliminate books or make firm claims that some books MUST be on the list. Is everyone happy with the list? Probably not, but at least we’ve all had a chance to participate in the selections.
After that, we set dates. The person who presents the book is responsible for arranging the location and time of the meeting. We’ve had some fun choices: we met at an Ethiopian restaurant when we discussed Cutting for Stone, and an Indian restaurant for White Teeth. I take everyone’s month requests into consideration (“my book is set in the south; give me a hot month”; “I don’t want to commit to a Friday”; “Friday is best, so I can Skype” [our overseas member, Sara] “No cold months for me”…you get the idea) and match books to a date. I love working out that little piece of the puzzle.
Curious about our 2012 list?
- February: Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
- March:Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
- April: Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates
- May: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- June: Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard
- July: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- August: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- September: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
- October: At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
- December: Radical Son by David Horowitz
Are you in a book club? How does your group select its books?
Our book club has been led by the same woman for 25 years. It’s also a woman’s only group. She’s held us together through thick and thin. There is always a driving force behind any good group of people, methinks. Your list of books sounds excellent!
Wow, you guys read REAL books! lol. We have a book club at the library and the members choose the book for next month at that month’s meeting. It seems to work pretty well but the biggest challenge for us is getting people to come to a book club where they can’t drink wine!
I loved “Death Comes for the Archbishop” though I am a Willa Cather nut 🙂 I like how you your club is running. The only one I’ve been a part of is the one at my public library and I gave it up because it caused me to read less than I would normally. I’m not much for reading multiple titles at a time (except perhaps research reading and pleasure reading) and the club got to the point that it was almost always non-fiction which I’m not often a fan of and most of that was highly political which I’m really not a fan of. I’d end up dragging my feet taking all 6 weeks to read the selected title and never have time to read what I wanted to read. Plus, it was on the same night as knitting and I no longer felt it was worth skipping a knit night.