Out with the (c)OLD! and in with 30% off spring styles 🌷🌷 SHOP SPRING CLEANING
The start of a new year offers a great opportunity to set up new routines—whether that’s creating space for daily meditations, a workout schedule, or screen-time reduction, creating resolutions can help jumpstart a whole new lifestyle. And if your goal is to read more, why not involve some of your fellow biblophiles? A book club fosters a sense of community while also holding you accountable to your reading goals. I’ve been the de facto leader of my book club (jokingly dubbed the Book Coven for all the strong female energy we have going on) for two years now and have learned a lot in the process. Follow these steps for creating your own book club and you’ll be blazing through pages in no time.
Need some reading list inspiration? Check out our spring and fall reading guides from last year.
First thing’s first, who’s joining your club? My book club started as a core group of my friends, but even so, there were several of my closest pals who opted out because they aren’t big readers. When forming your club, try not to exclude anyone, but also be understanding if a book club isn’t their thing. Over time, we invited additional members and some others drifted away, but at its height, our group had more than 20 people. Word of advice: if you’re going to have this many, you need to stay organized. Not everyone will come to every meeting, but if they do, you need to have structure so that meetings don’t stretch into the wee hours. Whether your cohort is just two or 20, the purpose of a book club is to enjoy something together, no matter how many.
Now for the fun part! Effective books for this communal adventure are ones that offer lots of entry points for reflection, ones that give you good talking points. Perhaps you want to set up your book club with a theme: historical fiction, works by people of color, memoirs. We don’t have a formal theme, but my book club tries to focus on reading works written by women and minorities with topics that somehow open our eyes to a world outside our own.
As far as who selects the book, we choose in alphabetical order. Each month, the next person in line selects three books that go up for a vote with the whole group. This allows people to show off their personal reading taste, which has meant that I’ve read more books outside of my typical literary bubble.
A couple tips:
Make sure everyone has adequate time to read the book. Don’t choose something with 800 pages and expect to meet three weeks later.
Avoid “beach reads.” While super fun, they don’t always offer many discussion points.
Change it up! If you read something heavy one month, try a lighter book the next. If you’ve been reading a lot of fiction, seek out a true story.
When forming your book club, choose a timeline that makes sense for your group and try to set dates for meetings far enough in advance that members can make space on their calendars. Perhaps you meet monthly, every couple months, or even quarterly. And then comes the question of whether to meet IRL or virtually. My club formed in early 2020, meaning that it didn’t take long for us to transition fully to Zoom meetings. In the last few months, we’ve had more sessions in person. There are pluses and minuses to both. If you’re meeting in person, make sure everyone brings something to drink or snack on so it doesn’t all land on the host to provide libations. Meeting online allows far-flung friends to be able to join.
Book clubs have a bit of a reputation as just being an excuse to get together, drink a bunch of wine, and gossip. And, if that’s your club vibe, power to you! But if you want to avoid getting to the end of the night without having talked about the book, you’re going to need some structure. When my club meets in real life, there’s about a half hour or so of hanging out, having a few drinks, chit chatting, and then we set a firm time to sit down and get to talking. Having done most of our meetings online helped create an effective format that we use no matter how we meet. Whoever chose the book starts by introducing some discussion questions (more on that later) and sharing their thoughts, then they choose the next person to speak, who chooses the next person to speak and so on. People can certainly chime in out of turn, but this system allows everyone a chance to share without too much interruption.
Having discussion questions is helpful to guide the meeting and to create consistency in your conversations. For a lot of books, a quick Google search of “[insert book name] discussion questions” will offer a starting point for things to talk about. But it can also be interesting to have some questions you ask with every book. For my book club, we ask the general questions of “Did you like it? What did or didn’t you like about it?”, but we also ask, every time, “Is it feminist?”. After that, we address questions that are specific to our reading.
On the whole, book club is one of the most inspiring, fulfilling things that I do on a regular basis. The exchange of ideas, the shared experience of reading and the intimate discussions within the safe space of our circle, it’s as good as it gets. I hope you and your club can find some of the same.
