[issybird]

I greatly enjoyed participating in the various clubs. It called for closer reading and more critical reading than my typical read and I got a lot from that level of engagement and the subsequent discussion. I miss it. Especially after this Covid year, when I read a lot more junk than is my typical wont.

However, I think the weight of the selection process ended up crushing all the clubs. Or to put it another way, the action was too weighted at the front end. And a book club where people don’t participate in the discussion is an exercise in futility, it seems to me.

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

What could be of interest to me and perhaps to others would be an occasional “buddy read” of a specific book nominated by an individual inviting others to join him or her in reading and discussing it.

Yes. This would interest me, also, and would get away from all the time and effort expended in coming up with a selection.

Originally Posted by hildea

I've never voted because I didn't want to commit to read a book that really didn't tempt me. It is reasonable to require that anyone voting should also at least try to read the selected book, but that means that I'm not going to vote.

The selection process at the NLBC tended to result in “compromise” picks, and I’m not damning that. With disparate tastes it’s as much as you could hope for, I think. One good thing about disparate tastes is that it’s a horizon-broadener and I enjoyed that aspect of it, even if a book might not have been exactly to my taste. I read enough that one relative dud a month wasn’t a disaster and goodness knows I pick enough duds on my own.

We had a face-to-face book club at my job, and when we found ourselves saying "I haven't gotten around to reading this month's book" too often, we switched to short stories (ie. a single short story each time) -- that helped a lot. Are anyone else here interested in trying that? When the commitment in time is much less, it's easier to get more people to read, and to get them to read genres they normally avoid.

I’ve sometimes thought that a bimonthly discussion might be the answer; it wouldn’t take over your reading every month and the timing wouldn’t be as tricky. That doesn’t get around the selection process though and I don’t think that format is sustainable at MR any more.