July 28, 2010
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July 28, 2010
By Erika Weisensee, Oregon Writer 
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” - Henry David Thoreau
About three years ago, when I had emerged from the haze of my son’s infancy, I was ready and rested enough to reclaim a genuine love of mine: Reading. Feeling a bit isolated, I also wanted more time with a small and special group of family and friends, my inner circle. So, I combined those two needs and started my own book club. I’ve been reading and reaping the rewards of it ever since.
If you love reading and want to, as I did, use books to bring people together, here are some tips for starting a book club:
1) Find people who enjoy each other and love to read.
2) Be a democracy. If one person chooses all the books, it could begin to feel like a teacher assigning homework. In my club, all of us suggest titles and then we agree on what to read next.
3) Eat good food. Thoughtful discussion requires plenty of nourishment. If everyone contributes something to the meal (dessert, a salad, an appetizer, drinks, etc.) no one is over-burdened.
4) Let discussion questions guide you. A group of friends or family can easily get distracted and never actually discuss the book. To avoid this, we each come with questions we want to ask others about the book. When the questions are gone, we have plenty of unstructured time to discuss whatever we want.
5) Choose great books. That’s easier said than done. There are so many choices out there. Numerous websites like www.bookclubclassics.com and www.readinggroupchoices.com provide title suggestions for book groups. For a complete list of Oprah’s Book Club titles, visit www.oprah.com.
6) Read old books, too. Bookstores seem to push the brand-new titles still in hardback. But you can save a lot of money by reading classics and non-new titles available in libraries.
Here are just a few of the books we have enjoyed since we started nearly three years ago (in no particular order):
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Buy them a Kindle or ebook like Olivia Rossi suggested.
The whole point of a book club IS to get people to read. Now they have an incentive. I think you will find it way more easily than you thought to start one and get people to join. It is key to start with a good book which is point #5 in Erika’s list.
I love my book groups! Yes, I said groups, plural. I belong to one made up of friends from my former job; another of mommy friends. I’m not always able to make it to both groups, but either way I end up with lots of great reading material and food for discussion, as well as new and deepened friendships.
One of my groups has tried to read books in different categories so as to read a variety of different types: a biography one month, a short story collection another month, a classic another month; something relating to the African-American experience for Black History month in February, and “something scary” (suspense, mystery, classic horror such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) in October. It’s a lot of fun and I like the variety.
One of my groups also read “The Help” this year–I totally loved that one. We read “Dragon Tattoo” this month, and “East of Eden” is our August book for my other group.
That is special that you keep in touch with your former co-workers. The people you work with is always a unique experience as we all have suffered together under the same bosses which brings us closer, but when we move on we lose contact.
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The problem with starting a book club is that so few of my friends read books. They just surf te einternet and considering it reading.