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Most book clubs are doing it wrong « the jsomers.net blog

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The standard way to run a book club is to have everybody finish the book before meeting to talk about it. You have one meeting per book. The discussion goes on for one or two hours before it runs out of gas, and then the group picks the next book, and you agree to meet in another month or six weeks. You would never run a class this way, because it practically minimizes the value that each participant gets from being in the group. The problem is that there's no time to cash in on anyone else's insights. If someone says something in the meeting that reframes how you think about the book -- they suggest that Holden is lying, or that Kinbote wrote Canto IV; they tell you to read Portrait first, so you can understand Stephen's double bind; they claim that Offred's tale is a series of transcripts, not journal entries -- well, now it's too late, because you've finished reading the book and you're probably never going back to it. What makes a class useful is precisely that it lets you compare

Most book clubs are doing it wrong << the jsomers.net blog the jsomers.net blog. About Subscribe Read More Contact me Most book clubs are doing it wrong by James Somers , July 15, 2017 The standard way to run a book club is to have everybody finish the book before meeting to talk about it. You have one meeting per book. The discussion goes on for one or two hours before it runs out of gas, and then the group picks the next book, and you agree to meet in another month or six weeks. You would never run a class this way, because it practically minimizes the value that each participant gets from b

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