Creating a Book Club

Because I seem to have an abundance of time on my hands, or perhaps because there aren't enough books on my ToBeRead  list, I have decided to help a friend start a book club.  She used to go to my other book club, but due to her very full schedule stopped going years ago.  Since that time she has often mentioned that she'd thought about starting a new book club.  In the last year, every time I've seen her I've asked if she was ready to get it going.  Finally I'd bugged her enough, it seems--we got our new book club off the ground this spring.

Organization:  We wanted to have all the members be able to pick books if they wished, with no rules delineating what type of books we would or wouldn't read.  We are open to anything!  The point is to get people reading, get people branching out in what they are reading, and get people together to talk about what they are reading.  We decided to meet once a month (or thereabouts, depending on schedules) to discuss the book read that month.  In order to create a low pressure meeting, we will be rather unstructured in our discussions...while discussing the different parts of the book that caught our interest, we will not have studied or formal discussion questions.  As a way to break up the monthly monotony, we'd like to incorporate theme months every now and again such as junior fiction month, or poetry focus.  We want it to be fun.

While a group of 5-7 seems to be ideal for well balanced discussion, we have started out with more people than that, expecting that at some point the group will shrink and settle into a workable size.  As our very first book, we have chosen Random Harvest by James Hilton.  It was published in 1941, and was immediately made into a movie with Greer Garson.  As a token of appreciation and great things to come, I made bookmarks for each of the girls coming to the book club, and bundled them up with a small notebook, bookmark pen, and--of course--M&Ms.  Who doesn't like M&Ms?  I will be writing a review of Random Harvest shortly, and our monthly books thereafter.  Stay tuned!