Starting Book Clubs – Examples

How book club members conduct their interactions is a book in itself!  Book clubbers are truly creative!  Wait til you read some of their stories.

Here are a few examples sent in from our readers on how their book clubs are thriving:

BUSINESS AND BLUEBERRIES The Blueberry Book Club formed several years ago with six women business owners who wanted to grow their businesses through continued learning from other successful author entrepreneurs and to collaborate in the process.  Our members meet for breakfast at a local diner that serves sumptuous blueberry pancakes (thus, the name).  Every month, one member selects a book to read.  The others can read the book or not.  At the breakfast meetings, about 90 percent of the conversation revolves around business issues and professional development. We have become each others ad hoc advisory board. Only about 10 percent of the meeting is devoted to discussions about the book.  The discussions are usually limited to:  Did anyone read the book?  What was your takeaway from it?  If we haven’t read the book, should we? Even though this is a very loosely run book club, it’s effective for us.  We are all avid book readers, have limited time and thirst for new ways to be stellar professionals and business women.  Since we are so short on time, we are considering reading only summaries of business books. Soundview Executive Book Summaries is an excellent choice.

LET THE SPIRITS SPEAK Our group is a spiritual book club that meets at my house for dinner.  The type of book that is the selection of the month will dictate the format.  For example, this month’s book is on Spiritual Astrology so we talked about how we can use the book to help us, our loved ones.  We each made a commitment of one thing we will work on that the book suggested.  Previously, our book was The God Code by Gregg Braden.  It was more scientific and metaphysical so I ended up doing most of the talking to explain the theories suggested in the book.  Our next book is a spiritual novel, so I suspect the format will be different and we might talk about what we liked and didn’t like, or how we can apply it to our lives or the meaning and philosophy/lessons introduced.

Currently, we are reading The Day After Tomorrow, a 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist for Young Adult Fiction by  Sandee Sgarlata which can be purchased at Amazon, if it’s of interest to you. We select our books by having each person write down a book title or topic that they would like to know more about, we put them in a basket and do a drawing.  It’s cool that each month has been something really great that we are all excited about.

LET’S CHUCKLE ABOUT NEW YORKERS We meet to discuss one thing:  the cartoons in the New Yorker. We are all fascinated by them and look forward to each issue.  These cartoons typically need a lot of thought to study and appreciate them.  What is of interest to our club is the different perspective each one of us brings to those cartoons.  We also have followed many of the illustrators who are such interesting people on their own right.  For instance, Julia Suits is one of our favorites!  Of course we do read the rest of the articles in the magazine.  Our discussions have consistently led us to extended discussions of books we have read that come to mind when reviewing the cartoons.  We tie the messages of the cartoons to our other books.  Sounds strange but somehow our members all have this mutual interest and it works well for us.

ARE YOU LISTENING? Our book club is focused on audio books only.  There are a few great sources for us to get them.  We usually use Audible.com or BooksFree.com, both happen to be offering great discounts now:

Limited Time Offer – Get Your First 3 Months at AUDIBLE for $7.49/month!
20% off your first month at BOOKSFREE.com. Use coupon code: CJ86.

After we have downloaded the book and read through it, we meet for a long lunch and discuss the parts we liked best.  We are typically focused on an author’s style of writing, not as much on the story alone and we all like to “read” our books while sitting at our computers doing other things.  We particularly love it when an author recites his or her own book but the readers are usually so good it doesn’t really matter.

ECONOMY-ISTS Our group will only read inexpensive paperbacks.  We are also all on limited budgets and can’t buy those fancy books from the bookstores. We do go to used bookstores but can’t always find the number of copies we want.  Instead we have made our economical situation an advantage and are reading tons of books from companies who send us cheap books for low shipping costs.  There are a few companies out there doing this but the one we have favored lately is BetterWorldBooks.com – (2 Million Used Books sold to fund literacy worldwide. Free Carbon Neutral Shipping in the USA, $3.97 Worldwide.).

GEOGRAPHY OVERCOME Carol, in Scotland, started an international, online book club. The members are currently living in four countries: England, Scotland, Greece, and the United States. We take turns, alphabetically by first name, choosing a book. We discuss the book using Yahoo Groups. We have no particular criteria for book selection, but the members seem to enjoy novels that are set in an exotic location, with perhaps some political overtones. We average a book every two months or so, partly because it takes a long time for the woman in Greece to receive a book after she orders it. Online discussion isn’t as much fun as discussing a book with everyone physically in the same room, but it allows the members time to carefully compose their thoughts about the book. Many of the books on the list are books I never would have chosen on my own, but I really enjoyed most of them.