Book clubs are all the rage these days – and growing in popularity. Even celebrities like Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, and others have created their own book clubs. While the idea of starting a book club of your own, who doesn’t want someone else to be equally shattered when an amazing bookends, may sound appealing, who do you invite and how do you get things started? Here’s what you need to know about how to start a book club.
Identify People You’d Like to Invite
Make sure your book club is invitation only and choose people who share your passion for a great book and aren’t afraid to share their experiences. Reading a book is like living a different life for a little while. It changes you.
You want your book club to be filled with people who feel the same and are willing to talk about how they are changed by the book, what the book has meant to them, and more. Most of all, you want your book club to be filled with people you find fun to be around. After all, you’re going to be spending quite a bit of time with these people.
Create a Fun Theme for Your Book Club
This theme will set the tone for the books you’ll read in your club. You can create a club based on books that are currently being made into movies, for instance or sizzling cookbook clubs where you each try a recipe from the cookbook and share the food with the other members.
You could do a holiday-themed book club where you explore books set on various holidays celebrated around the world or globe-trotting book clubs where each book is set in a different exotic location. You can even go with a wine and mystery theme for some truly excellent “whodunit?” conversations. The sky is the limit! Just make sure you’re on board to read the books your club selects.
Decide How Often and Where You’ll Meet
Whether you decide to make your book club a virtual book club thanks to the power of Zoom and other web conferencing software, or you meet in person at one location or rotate between member houses, it’s important to know where you’re going to meet and how often you’ll get together to share your passion for your next great read. Weekly meetings allow you to kind of stay “on the same pages” so to speak so that no one reads too far ahead of the rest of the group. You may even want to establish rules about reading ahead and spoilers to discourage the practice.
Choose Your First Book
The first book will set the tone for the book club. Make sure it’s in keeping with the theme as well as one that offers fairly universal appeal. Most importantly, make sure it is one you’re confident your club can discuss at length once you’ve read the book. You might want to have votes or rotate selections among members for upcoming books but you, as the organizer of your book club, need to select the first book to make sure it’s a real winner.
Create a Structure for Book Club Discussions
For some, this may include writing down a list of questions to ask about a particular book ahead of club meetings. For others, it might be privately polling members to see what aspects of the book they’d like to discuss most. The key is to give everyone a voice so that some members don’t feel left behind by more vocal or opinionated members of the group.
Now that you know how to start a book club, you can use your book club as an ingenious way to get to know your neighbors or make new friends when becoming part of the Linkside at Old Hawthorne community.
