Picking The Book

Deciding how each month's title will be chosen can't be done too early or too decisively. It helps if you have some sort of limit on what kind of books you'll read. In our group, it's nothing under fifty years of age and preferably something that would be at least loosely considered a classic. We stretch the boundaries a bit -- we recently read Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I'm hoping there'll be some interest in reading The Bell Jar at some point. We don't seem to do well with short stories, although a few of us have expressed an interest in reading a particular collection of Chekhov, so that may change. We haven't read any nonfiction yet, but I'd like to tackle Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas at some point. We'll see how it goes. At any rate, this is a group that's as much about continuing our education and enjoying the best and the biggest names out there in lit-land. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but we like it. You might like something else better. Just make sure you've got something well-defined enough that you aren't casting wildly around every month for something to read next time.

Some genres you might enjoy basing a book group around are: science fiction, science nonfiction, fantasy, romance, dark fiction, light fiction, historical fiction, unabashed bodice rippers, current events, current bestsellers, women's studies, men's studies, humor, horror...I'm sure you'll find something you can all enjoy.

Some things that have worked for us and for others:

1. Let the members take turns picking what book to read. This has the advantage of making sure that everyone's happy with the selection at least once a year or so (depending on the size of your group); providing a decent diversity of titles; and letting you know without the trouble and expense of running background checks who in the group is certifiably insane. The big disadvantage is that if the selection of titles is too wonderfully diverse, the group may consist, at any given meeting, of whoever picked the title that month and the group leader, since no one else got past page three of something they'd never heard of before and wish they hadn't now.

2. At the first meeting, poll the group for names of books they'd like to read in the future. Jot down all the titles thrown at you, crossing out any that absolutely no one in the group but the suggester likes the sound of. Pick something off this list for the next meeting, or choose two titles and have the group decide between them. Continue picking titles off the list until you run out. Repeat as necessary.

3. Read books of which there are movie versions, especially something that's in the theatre at the time the group is reading the book. This is tricky, because it only works if you feel pretty certain that people will read the book and not just run out and see the movie. Of course, if the book is a play, this is okay.

Although I almost always detest movies drawn from books, they can spark some interesting conversations. And they can make it easier to choose which title to read next. We read The Merchant of Venice when Al Pacino decided to take to the screen as Shylock, and Pride and Prejudice because I'd heard so much about the movie Bride and Prejudice that I just had to see it, which meant that I'd be rereading P&P anyway, which meant that everybody in the group might as well be reading it too, since they hadn't read any Austen. The television version of Their Eyes Were Watching God moved one member who'd been wanting to read the book since before the group even officially formed to threaten a bloodless coup if that wasn't our next title, which needless to say it was. And a pretty good one, too.

4. If the book's more than, say, four hundred pages, chop it up and talk about it in bits. Especially if the group is made up of people with jobs or children or both, no more than two or three hundred pages a month is a reasonable limit. Breaking up a big book is better than limiting what you can and can't read based on length. You don't want to miss out on some good stuff just because, say, Henry James has never known when to put a sock in it. Our group read Anna Karenina one summer because one member of the group worships at the altar of Oprah (yes, this was the Their Eyes fiend) and that was what the goddess wanted all her acolytes to read, so we decided what the hell. Especially since I had a copy of the most recent translation just sitting around collecting dust anyway.

Anna Karenina, for those of you who haven't been keeping track, is something like 800 pages long, and there was no way we were going to be able to do it in a month. So we broke it up into three manageable portions. If you do something like this, remember to divide things up based on chapters, not page numbers, since people will undoubtedly have different editions and translations and like that. I thought I'd made this pretty clear that summer, only to find at the first Anna meeting that some people had read some pretty pivotal stuff way too soon and were blurting it out to everyone who hadn't gotten there yet, while others had dutifully stopped reading just as Anna was about to break some seriously important news to Vronsky.

Employing one of these methods does not preclude using another at another time. Our group flips back and forth between all of these, sometimes in the course of a single evening. Find what works for your particular group. Be flexible enough to understand that what may once have seemed a perfect fit is now too binding or even too loose. The point is to have a good time with the books and the people you're hanging out with, damn it.

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