pH Balance

As January closes out, I thought it would be good to look back on what I’ve done to accomplish the reading goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year: to read more widely and deeply. So far, I’ve completed 2/24 books for the BookRiot challenge and am in the middle of Anna Karenina—so far, so good.

There’s another way that my relationship with reading has changed: I joined a book club.

I have a few reading buddies who lend me books, borrow my books, and chat with me about what I’ve been reading. Conversations with those friends are great, of course, but very rarely do they get as involved as a book club discussion. You can be talking about a book for five minutes and then transition to another topic with an ocean’s worth of words left unsaid that just bubble up in your brain with nowhere to go.

Maybe that’s what motivates you to start a blog. But maybe you’re looking for some more human contact, a voice in your head besides your own: and maybe even someone to hold you accountable to actually finish a book.

There are plenty of reasons to start a book club. If you’ve decided to start one, read on:

getting started

I was not the architect of this group. My sister created a group chat (“prose before bros”) and added a couple friends who are either readers or wish to become one. Everyone promised to read one book per month and meet online at the end of the month for an hour-ish long discussion.

Someone would choose a book each month and would also pick someone else to take over next month. I picked January’s book: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. It was important to pick a book with some depth, but still something that most people would be interested in reading (and would have time to finish in a month). Fantasy books are great for book clubs because you can have all sorts of discussions about the novel’s world. However, any genre would work: as long as your book has interesting characters, at least one subplot, and well-written prose, you have nothing to worry about.

To prepare, I read the book well in advance of the meeting (easier said than done, I was on vacation), created a google form with discussion questions (the back of the book had some questions to get me started), and sent that out one week before the meeting. I asked everyone to complete these questions before we met. It was less important to get coherent answers down in the form and more important to get thinking about the book and your relationship to it.

If you’re curious about the questions, I wrote them below. I bolded questions that can be used for any book:

1. What did you like/dislike about the book?
2. Did you relate to any of the characters in the book? Did they remind you of other characters or people you know in real life?
3. If you had to choose one House to be in (including Lethe), which would it be? If your friends or family had to pick for you, do you think they would choose differently, and why?
4. At one point in the novel it’s said that New Haven is a place where magic took root. Is there a place you’ve visited that you felt that had a magical quality to it?
5. Any other thoughts/comments about the book?

Then, we had the meeting. We pretty much went through the Google form answers, though there were some tangents (as to be expected). It was a great time, and we’re on track to meet again next month.

reflections

1. I probably should have taken more notes, because there was a lot I didn’t remember about the book. Writing quotes would have been good too.
2. I liked hearing what others had to say—they noticed and appreciated things I didn’t.
3. It was important for me to verbalize what I liked/disliked. Often times, I jump from one book to another without writing more than ten words on Goodreads about my feelings regarding the book. I learned more about who I am and what I like after the discussion.

If you have book club or communal reading experiences you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them!