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Faithful blog reader and published author Melissa has asked the question of the year. How does the book club select books?
Due to extraordinary good fortune, I am in two book clubs. Both clubs have great discussions and insights. The book selection process for one is polar opposite to the other. The description is perhaps tedious, but here it is.
Book Club 1
was started by my husband in July 2015, includes participants of all genders, but does not usually include snacks or beverages. The participants include a few who need to or greatly prefer to listen to audio books, and others favor the e-book format, so our selection process tries to take that into account.
This book club tends to pick books with a more recent publication date than the other club, with an average at the year 2000, and the earliest 1813. About half of our selections are from female authors, and about one-quarter of our books are non-fiction. No children’s lit. Poetry only once.
Our process has also changed in the past year or so, because we found that audio & ebooks were not available quickly from the library. In my understanding, this is due to publishers putting a strangle-hold on library copies. Almost all books worth reading have a wait time at the library, for digital & audio versions.
So now, we select the book a few months out. At our November gathering, we selected the date and the book for January. Some attend in person and the rest on zoom. In the winter months, we sometimes decide to do zoom only.
To select the book, people make suggestions – titles and authors. Someone looks up availability of the various formats at the local library. I try to look up page count and publication date, because if it’s more than 450 pages we might need extra time. We come to a consensus agreement on which book to read. Then we pick a date and discussion leader.
There are seven authors that this book club has chosen more than once. Philip Roth is a favorite for this book club (for me, he’s good but not my favorite) – we have read three of his works. We have read two books by each of the following authors: Karen Armstrong, Fredrik Backman, Louise Erdrich, Terry Pratchett, Kim Michele Richardson, and John Steinbeck.
Book Club 2
was started by my children’s piano teacher in Sep 2016, with the clever name of “Page Turners Book Club” which I like to use to differentiate it from my other book club.
For most of the discussions, the participants are all women. We hold our meetings at participants’ houses, with snacks and beverages, sometimes including wine.
This book club has selected plenty of 21st century books, but has more of a selection from earlier eras (average publication date 1975; earliest 1595 -- Shakespeare) than Book Club 1. The selections are 65% from female authors. This group also reads children's and Y.A. lit. We usually discuss poetry in November, either picking the works of one poet, or reading poems from a selection of authors.
This group is quite intentional about book selection, and picks the books for the entire year ahead of time. If we can, we like to have a book for each of these categories, sometimes combining them:
- A Pulitzer Prize winner
- A beloved classic
- A novel for Black History month
- Women’s history
- Children’s / Y.A. lit
- winter or Christmas focus for December
- something lighter for September and May
- poetry month - usually November
- coordinated with a theater performance: Shakespeare, or another play
In July or August we gather suggestions for the year starting in September or October. I am not the ‘director’ of this club, but I try to get the suggestions ahead of time so I can look up the page count & publication date. Another person looks up what local theater performances in the upcoming year might be of interest. Then there is a lively discussion to pick the books. If there is a theater play (Shakespeare, anyone?) being presented in town, we plan to read and discuss that play in the month or two before the performance.
We just had our session for poetry in November. We had a selection of poems focussed on winter, some of which we read out loud. It was wonderful to hear the reflections and insights of these women! I get almost nothing out of poetry when I read it on my own.
This book club is more likely to revisit an author's work, reading eleven authors more than once. We've read three works each by Kate DiCamillo, Charles Dickens, Ann Patchett, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Strout, Colson Whitehead. And two works each by Jane Austen, Annie Dillard, Margot Livesey, Maggie O'Farrell, and Mary Oliver (two sessions reading selected poems).
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| Book Club 1 started in July 2015, but all the selections that year were by male authors. The members of the book club have changed since then, and so has our author selection. |
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