Your Guide to Start a Book Club

Reading books is always a pleasure for a book lover, but the pleasure is doubled when the passion is shared Debating and discussing over a book is a great way to exchange views and open your eyes and mind up on some details and viewpoints you might not be able to come up with on your own. Sharing a passion reinforce friendship bonds, and can also serve you to make new friendships with people with the same interests. This guide will show you the steps you should take in order to create a book club and enjoy the reading.

Steps to start a Book Club:

1. Pick a specific books genre.

Everyone have a specific book genre they like the most. Even the most intellectual people who like to read all kinds and be aware of all aspects have a kind they prefer over others. It might be romance or sci-fi or history books. The point from starting a book club is to dive deeper in the genre you really like, not forcing yourself to like other genres. And also connecting with people with the same interests.

2. Schedule and locate the book club meetings.

In order to avoid conflicts of time tables, set with your friends specific times during the week to meet in a place calm and suitable for reading. The meetings should be flexible to meet the free times of the majority of members, if not all of them. An alternative to meeting in public is meeting online, you can start a forum or an online chat room where all the members can gather and discuss without having to go out. But still, reading in the open air is the best option.

3. Announce the start of the new book club.

The announcement depends on whether you are willing to keep the book club exclusively for your friend and family members, or you want it to be more public, in order to meet new people and widen your circle. In the first case, you should be already able to tell who amongst your friends like the same genre as you and who would be interested and committed enough to get involved in your book club. The second case, you will have to put flyers in your local library and post the news online or even create a page for the purpose. The flyers should include details about the book genre the club will be about and why not some information about the person starting it.

4. Get ready.

As the creator of the book club, it’s your duty to make sure everything is well arranged before the meetings takes place, preparing food and drinks is required, specially if you are hosting the club meeting in your house. Other members will contribute as well, of course. If you agreed before starting the club on taking turns in hosting the meetings in each others places, then the host will take charge of everything.

5. Ground Rules.

The first meeting of the club should be dedicated to setting ground rules, as such as how many book are the members willing to read, and how much time will you spend on a single book, and it would be great if you could make a list of all the books you all want to read and discuss together. Make a vote to decide what book will be your first, and exchange contact information to stay in touch with each other.

6. Stay up to date.

Make sure your read the assigned part of the book before the meeting, or at least a major part of it so that you will be able to keep up with the discussions and contribute with your opinions. While reading, you might wanna note down your ideas and thoughts in order to remember them and discuss them with the other members. Staying up to date will save you from spoilers that would be caused by the discussions of parts you still didn’t reach yet. In case you were a fast reader, being ahead of the group will do you no harm, but you should be careful not to spoil others. You might also want to read another book in parallel in order to slow down your progress.

7. Flexibility.

Your book club should be able to develop constantly to fit the members’ needs and desires, and in order to keep the flames of books passion alive.