Week 6 Class Reflection

Confessions of a middle-aged woman...ok, not EVERYTHING!

I'll admit it right now.  I have never been in a book club.  Not that I haven't wanted to be in a book club, but I just never seemed to be in the right place at the right time to start or even join a book club.  Wait- I take that back.  A few summers ago some friends (about 5 of us) and I decided to start a poolside book club (sounds pretty great, doesn't it?).  A book was chosen, I read it ("Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann), I think others read it- at least one did, we had our first meeting, and we talked about the book for a total of six minutes before we moved on to other topics of interest.  It was our first- and last meeting.

What went wrong?  I quite enjoyed the book and my other friend who suggested the book enjoyed it too, but we never really started a discussion of the novel. We had no leader, no list of questions to ponder, not everyone had read the book, and we were sitting by a pool... any one of these reasons is enough to hinder the progress of a discussion.  SO what would I do differently next time?

After our discussion in class this week and thinking more about what makes a good book club, I believe that a thematic book club is the most inclusive option.  Not everyone in my "book club" was excited about reading the book.  It was only chosen because it was well known and out of lack of enthusiasm for anything else.  Honestly, it was pretty depressing- not a fun, summer chick-lit read.  The concept of a thematic book club avoids the pitfalls of a "popular" book club.  If my club members and I had all brought to the table (aka poolside) a great interest in middle-aged prostitutes, grieving mothers, or hit-and-run accidents we might have been more interested in not only reading our chosen National Book Award-winning novel, but we could have continued our summertime book club with other novels based on the same depressing themes.  This was exactly the problem with the creation of our book club.  As a group we never established what we liked to read as individuals, we only knew that we each wanted to be in a book club.

It will be interesting to read what has been chosen by our book club cohorts for this class, as the only category of book we were given was “short story”.  Though we are all in the same academic program, we all come from diverse backgrounds, with varied interests, and different expectations for what a book club should be, even between my partner and I, we presented quite dissimilar suggestions to share with our group.  I printed out all of our group’s readings today (sorry Marc Prensky) and I look forward to snuggling underneath the covers on this wintry day and enjoying my group’s (at first glance) very intellectual short stories.

And no, I won’t be wearing my swimsuit.