Ask the Book Lady
Taking Too Long to Pick a Book
Dear Book Lady,
I'm part of a book group, and I really like it. The only problem is, we seem to spend more time at each meeting picking which book to read next than we do actually talking about the book we've already read. It's really frustrating, and sometimes by the time we've figured out a title, all the arguing (it's too heated to be called "discussing") has ruined the fun of the evening. We all have a lot in common, so I don't see why this is such a problem, but it always is. Any advice?
There are several ways of dealing with this. The first one, and maybe the easiest, is to let someone else deal with it.
No, not me. I have a hard enough time figuring out what I'm going to read next when I have any choice in the matter at all, which, given how much research I'm always doing for one project or another, is rarely if ever. Not that I'm unsympathetic to your problem. I just wanted some pity to leak over to this corner of the room, too.
No, by someone else, I mean the author of one of those books that tells you what book your book group might enjoy. There are several available, since book groups have recently started springing up like wild daisies on graves and many enterprising writers have decided that someone has to help all those people decide what the hell they should be reading. You could grab a copy of The Readers' Choice: 200 Book Club Favorites, by Victoria Golden McMains; or A Year of Reading: A Month-by-Month Guide to Classics and Crowd-Pleasers for You and Your Book Group, by Elisabeth Ellington. For those who have a weakness for eating something related to what they're reading (or reading something related to what they're eating), there are now some books that link those two necessities of life, books and food. Try The Book Club Cookbook, by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp, or Recipe for a Book Club, by Mary O'Hare.
However, if your group is suffering from chronic indecisiveness, such books may only exacerbate the problem by giving you more titles to bicker about. What you may need is a way of narrowing down your options.
You could still turn to an outside source for this. You could, for instance, propose that your group plow through the books listed in Daniel S. Burt's The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time, or The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had by Susan Wise Bauer, with the understanding that you will skip any title that makes more than one member scream and writhe in agony just hearing about it. If you prefer genre works, use a book like Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, Horror: The 100 Best Books, or Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels.
Or you could go all out. Become a rotating dictatorship, for instance. Suggest that everyone have a turn picking the title each month, and no arguing. Or, if that seems too bossy, everyone jot a title down and one of the suggestions is drawn out of a hat each month to serve as the current selection.
If these ideas only lead to further arguments pretending to be discussions, your group's problem may not be indecisiveness at all, but just a good old-fashioned case of the orneries. You say you all have a lot in common. If what you share is sheer bloodymindedness, you might want to consider getting together with a more diverse group of people.
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