Lit and MR Book Clubs - the way forward

[issybird]

I like the idea of themes; my own suggestion would be "Books with a word related to time in the title." It would be fun to shake things up from strictly genre-based nominations and it would have the benefits of both avoiding a wrangle* about whether or not a book fits the genre and allowing more broad-based nominations.

I'm ready myself to move forward on expecting that those who vote will participate in a discussion. The current "vanity contest" (great phrase) isn't conducive to a vibrant club. There's value in discovery, yes, and nominations benefit from broad input, but once we move past that phase the voting should reflect those who will actually participate in the second phase. Lurkers, which I totally understand, also will benefit from an active discussion and droppers-in are entirely delightful as well, too. The book club wouldn't cease to be welcoming or open to all comers, but people could decide in any particular month if they were going to participate as lurkers, nominators in the first phase, droppers-in in the second phase, or totalitarians.

*I'm also ready to see an end to the wrangling; that's in fact the top of my wishlist. No criticisms of other nominations and while electioneering is fine and fun, it should consist of positive comments about a particular book rather than negative comments about others. A good-humored tone should allow people to get their point across!

[CRussel]

Other themes might include History, with historical fiction alongside actual history. Both provide an important look into the time and place, with historical fiction sometimes telling us more about the people and culture than pure history.

Or, radical thought, how about including alternative history? For example, I know FAR more than I ever thought I would about the 30 Years War and mid-17th century Europe based on having read Eric Flint's 1632 series. Oh, and they were a lot of fun.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by issybird

I'm ready myself to move forward on expecting that those who vote will participate in a discussion. The current "vanity contest" (great phrase) isn't conducive to a vibrant club. There's value in discovery, yes, and nominations benefit from broad input, but once we move past that phase the voting should reflect those who will actually participate in the second phase. Lurkers, which I totally understand, also will benefit from an active discussion and droppers-in are entirely delightful as well, too. The book club wouldn't cease to be welcoming or open to all comers, but people could decide in any particular month if they were going to participate as lurkers, nominators in the first phase, droppers-in in the second phase, or totalitarians.

Agreed. I'm in favour of keeping all the phases as open as possible, with the sole exception of voting. I don't actually know what mechanisms are possible here for that, but unless there are issues, I'd suggest a simple:

Please only vote if you're an active participant in the book discussions, or if you now expect to be for this month's ultimate selection, whatever it might be.

If that doesn't work, we'll have to think about alternatives, but I'm always in favour of the simplest approach when possible.

Originally Posted by issybird

*I'm also ready to see an end to the wrangling; that's in fact the top of my wishlist. No criticisms of other nominations and while electioneering is fine and fun, it should consist of positive comments about a particular book rather than negative comments about others. A good-humored tone should allow people to get their point across!

Amen! Up to and including Moderator Action if required. Enough, already! The wrangling and whinging are taking the fun out of the current club and I do NOT want to take that forward into any new club.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

My Wishlist:

Themes with room for interpretation. I googled "book club themes," and came up with great results. I list some examples below and some of the books that might fit them.

"Around the World" - literature from other cultures. Examples: the works of Haruki Murakami (Literary), The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo (thriller), The Three Body Problem (Science Fiction), Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening (Nonfiction).

"Food" - this one is wide open as it is about food and eating.
Examples: The Vegetarian (horror), Eat, Pray Love (nonfiction), The Food of the Gods (classic sci-fi)

Price limit. I would like us to agree on an upper limit for a monthly investment. Are you willing to spend the price of one movie ticket a month? Are you willing to spend the price of a six-pack of craft beer? Or are you a bargain hunter?

Incubation period. As some others have suggested, I would like to see us limit ourselves to things that have been on the shelf for at least one calendar year from the nomination date. This could very well take care of the price problem because you would be more likely to be able to get it from the library.

Visibility. As many others have suggested, I hope to see the book club moved to a front-page position in the forum rather than being a subforum of the recommendations.

I'm not needy at all, right?

Not at all. Worthy wish list items, and all should be doable. I've already commented on themes, but on the others:

• Price: I agree on an upper limit. My personal upper limit is $10 USD. But we do need to be cognizant of the different prices in different parts of the world. (Though many of us have found ways to temporarily travel as necessary. Happy to discuss those with any still unclear on the concept.<g>)
  
• Incubation Period: I like that designation. Yes, should not be a "NYTimes Best Seller Book Club". This will both help limit prices, but also help us avoid flash-in-the-pan books that don't turn out to be as good (or relevant) as everyone thought.
  
• Visibilty: I think a combination of moving to a full forum level, and some sort of badging (any artists out there willing to do a badge for us?) should help with that.

[kansaskyle]

I'm primarily a lurker to the Book Clubs. I did read one book, A Cold Day For Murder earlier this year. I have also participated in Goodreads groups and face-to-face book clubs in the past, and moderated book club discussions.

Recommendations

• Find/create discussion questions - I posted more information and examples below. In summary, I think preset discussion questions would greatly enhance the actual discussion and give readers things to think about as they read the book.
• Restructure the forum to promote discussion - As suggested, moving the Book Club to a top-level forum would potentially help attract more participants.
  
  I also think posting separate threads for book discussion questions would help. I'm guessing 15 to 40 sub posts would be a bit overwhelming per book, but having something like "[Book Title] - General chat" and then a few (two to five) additional threads like "[Book Title] - Discussion Question #1" would help generate separate discussion on the books.

More info on finding/creating questions
What I felt was missing in the MR club was any worthwhile discussion for those that read the book. I looked over the discussion thread again for the book I read here on MR, and the majority of posts were people saying they liked/disliked the book. There wasn't much actual discussion. I did try to to spark some back-and-forth with a couple questions, but the one respondent didn't feel like it was his or her right to speculate. I felt like that was actually part of what we as readers can explore and discuss in a book club.

Many books and clubs have a set of questions they post about the book to generate discussion. Here is an external link for The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society book, which includes 15 suggested questions for book club discussion.

If the author/publisher don't have a ready made list, someone would need to generate a set of questions to the book, or we could always default to some generic questions like the 40 suggested here.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by kansaskyle

More info on finding/creating questions
What I felt was missing in the MR club was any worthwhile discussion for those that read the book. I looked over the discussion thread again for the book I read here on MR, and the majority of posts were people saying they liked/disliked the book. There wasn't much actual discussion. I did try to to spark some back-and-forth with a couple questions, but the one respondent didn't feel like it was his or her right to speculate. I felt like that was actually part of what we as readers can explore and discuss in a book club.

Many books and clubs have a set of questions they post about the book to generate discussion. Here is an external link for The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society book, which includes 15 suggested questions for book club discussion.

If the author/publisher don't have a ready made list, someone would need to generate a set of questions to the book, or we could always default to some generic questions like the 40 suggested here.

You've given me a lot to think about. Basically, I agree with your conclusion, but perhaps not what lead up to it nor for the best way of coping.

I agree that, especially lately, discussions such as they've been have been at a level of why the reader liked or disliked a book, although on rereading the Cold Day discussion, I thought it went deeper than that and was in fact pretty successful. I think book choice is a major element here; sometimes there's not that much to be said.

I like the idea of discussion questions, especially if the nominator or someone else so motivated could pose a couple. I'm a bit leery of canned questions and I have to add that I hope we don't end up with typically popular book club choices, for many reasons.

[JSWolf]

Discussion questions read before the book is not a good idea. Think spoilers.

[kansaskyle]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Discussion questions read before the book is not a good idea. Think spoilers.

It depends on the questions.

I'm sure there are some that could contain spoilers (e.g., What did you think when Johnny was revealed as the murderer?), there are other more general questions that a reader can gauge as they go along (e.g., What did you think of the author's use of flashbacks to advance the story line?).

Regardless of whether we suggest questions before or after, I do think they would be valuable tools to advance discussion.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kansaskyle

Regardless of whether we suggest questions before or after, I do think they would be valuable tools to advance discussion.

Yes, the questions could be useful for after having read the book. Even your flashback question is a spoiler.

[CRussel]

I don't think discussion questions are a huge problem with spoilers, especially if they're not posed until we open the discussion. And the one thing we've learned fairly conclusively is that the discussion should NOT be opened until some fixed date after the voting. Opening it immediately after the voting didn't work out well.

Another thing that's been suggested that I think deserves further consideration is leapfrogging -- voting in January for March discussions, February for April discussions, etc.

[Dazrin]

I see a lot of value in having the questions ahead of time so we can be thinking about them as we read the book. I would like to see them even if they include minor spoilers.

The easy solution would be to have any book specific questions in a spoiler paragraph so that people can choose to look at them or not. We could also have some generic boilerplate type questions that apply to all books that are not in a spoiler.

Having the list of questions ahead of time also helps for those who want to start discussion right away. They can fill in their answers as soon as they want to so that when the official discussion starts they only need to review and post them. (I send myself a PM for that kind of thing so I have it saved.)

[CRussel]

Interesting, Dazrin. Not sure where I come down on that, but interesting approach. Might work.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Here are some of my thoughts on this topic. As an outside observer to the main club, I'm not sure that you embraced early discussions like you could have. It works very well in the literary club.

I think that leapfrogging is an interesting proposal that would help address library availability and personal time constraints. If that is the path forward, then I would recommend you start the discussion on the 1st of the month and not the 20th but encourage people to chime in at any time that month.

I believe that the literary club has done better at in-depth discussions than the main club. I believe that starting the discussion right away rather than waiting a few weeks promoted better discussions. I feel quite strongly about that actually . It enables people to post when they have time available and when thoughts are fresh. We discuss topics like where to find a book or merits of different translations or the publisher's version with the best introductory/supplemental material. We also discuss information about the author such as interviews, podcasts, links to book reviews, etc. Sometimes I find reading someone else's thoughts while I am reading helps to see things I would have missed.

The literary club respects that some people don't want spoilers. The forum has spoiler tags. We use these if you want to post something early in the discussion that others might not want to know. And of course nobody forces you to read the threads before you are finished!

I agree with issybird that I don't necessarily want to read all mainstream books that have pre-exisiting book club questions.

I think that we could develop a rather standard list of questions to initiate discussions. I also think there could be some standard author information like I described above posted. I think that the club moderators could help with developing questions while reading (perhaps with PMs from other members) that they could use to help facilitate better discussions. I don't want to feel like discussions are forced but clearly it's not happening organically and it's going take an effort at facilitation to promote it.

I think that as a club participant we should also feel accountable to add something meaningful to advance the discussion even if it is as simple ad adding "because" after I did or didn't like it. To me the point of belonging to a book club is to read new books I wouldn't necessarily find on my own and to have an interesting dialogue about them.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Great minds think alike. It was on another page, and I didn't see Dazrin's post until after I posted! Sorry if I was repetitious.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I think that leapfrogging is an interesting proposal that would help address library availability and personal time constraints. If that is the path forward, then I would recommend you start the discussion on the 1st of the month and not the 20th but encourage people to chime in at any time that month.

I would agree with the first of the month if we do this. It also makes it easy to remember.

As for early discussions? I was actually one of the promoters of it (though not the originator), and I found it simply didn't work for my own participation. I work better with a deadline, and that's been true my whole life. Apparently, the participants in the MR club did too, because what we ended up was a sharp decline in the discussion after we tried it. To balance that out, and address some of your concerns, what HAS happened in the MR club is that the voting discussion thread appears to get used for some of those pre-discussion discussions. We don't close the voting and nomination threads off, so people have used them for that. Seems to work well.