Reviews for The Book Group Book: A Thoughtful Guide to Forming and Enjoying a Stimulating Book Discussion Group

The average rating for The Book Group Book: A Thoughtful Guide to Forming and Enjoying a Stimulating Book Discussion Group based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-07 00:00:00 Lynn Collis My Version of the History of the Filipinos group here at Goodreads: March 2009 when I signed up at Goodreads. Prior to that, my idea of a five-star novel was A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Housseni and Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. Four stars would be Twilight by Stephanie Meyer and The Kite Runner also by Housseni. Goodreads changed all that. I still appreciate those books but I already found many other books more worthy of my admiration. When I joined Goodreads, I put in the 90+ books that I’ve read since childhood. Now, I have 600+ books in my read folder. October 2009 when I joined the Filipino group (TFG) here in Goodreads. I hesitated for more than six months because I saw that the group was consisted by mostly younger people than me and they barely had any activity. Monthly, they selected a book to read but only around 5-10 members (out of 400+) cast their votes. I noticed that only 1 or 2 members read the assigned book for the month. There was barely a decent on-line discussion and they never had a meet up so there was neither a face-to-face discussion. February 20, 2010 when I had a knee injury. I just finished reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being that night prior to going to the Badminton Center when my ACL got torn. After 3 weeks of consultation, I was scheduled for operation and my brother, also a Goodreads member, announced my scheduled operation in one of the threads in our group. Aaron, my batch mate at TFG, said that he would visit me. He did not. Rather, another TFG member, Ranee did. She was a surgeon stationed in the operating room where I had my ACL operation. July 22, 2007 when a certain Leah E. created the Filipino group (on-line book club) or TFG here in Goodreads. However, in my mind, the group was formed when I was lying on the hospital bed on March 4, 2010. It was the time when Dr. Ranee suggested for us to organize a meet up. She said she thought that having a meet up was a nice idea since we were talking on line anyway. I agreed. After all, when I joined TFG and I saw some 400 Filipinos in the book club, I said “cool.” I had always wondered how it would be nice to be a member of a book club and meet people I could discuss the books that I’ve read or reading. April 9, 2010 when we first met as a group: Ranee, Aaron, Emir, Chachic, Ariel, Jam, Jillian and one of the moderators of the group, Jzhunagev. That was the start of the 4 times a year major meet up (2010 and 2011). Major, because these did not include yet the movie dates, book hunting trips, attending book launches, book swaps, Komikon, or simple chats that some members had once in a while. For both years, we also had our annual trip to Quezon (my home province) and Christmas party, both of which were counted as major meet ups. For this year, we are even increasing the time we spend with each other. This month, on January 28, 2012, we will have our first face-to-face book discussion for George Orwell’s opus 1984. If this becomes a success, the other books will be Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince for February 2012 and Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for March 2012. We are also planning to do a charity work by visiting an orphanage as our Valentine’s event in February and Po has floated the idea of having a group sports fest during summer break. Aaron and Tina are also planning for us to have our own website where we can feature our group activities and the TFG’s 100 Favorite Books that our members voted for during the selection process last October and November 2010. TFG, composed mostly of Filipinos, is now proud of having 1,400 members. We are one of the biggest groups in Goodreads. Proofs: book publishers are now giving us free copies of their books, local writers inviting us to promote their books, and other local book clubs lurk in our website. Our membership more than tripled from the time I joined in. We have read 50+ books mostly fiction, used to be consisted mostly of contemporary bestsellers but now mixed with literary classics. One of the “original” moderators left and the remaining one, Jzhun appointed me to be his partner. Then I appointed the third, Tina (to represent women’s literature) and all of us agreed to have Angus, who headed the committee that selected TFG 100 last year, as the fourth. I decided to write the history of our book club based here at Goodreads because I was inspired by this book on book clubs by Ellen Slezak. This book contains testimonies of book club members across the U.S. I decided to read this book not only in preparation for our group’s the first face-to-face discussion on January 28, 2012 but also to get ideas on how to run a book club and actual book discussions. I learned a lot from the contributors to this essay anthology. Since all of the contributors are members of book clubs, they are readers. And some readers also write. So, some of the essays are really, really good. One fact struck me though: most book clubs in the US are composed of women. This is in direct contrast to TFG where men almost always outnumber women during our group activities. Also, most testimonies say that their group is informal and barely have rules. This, according to a couple of testimonies, made their book clubs still standing after all these years. This is not how I am planning to move our group forward. We have a very informal group now and I am trying to make rules with the face-to-face discussion being one of them. As a result of this, I think I have to make some adjustments: I will now tell the members that they can attend the face-to-face discussion even if they are still to read the book or did not finish reading the book. I will also continue to be democratic and I do not want this group to lead to its demise that was really what I was afraid of before imposing some rules. Well, it is still not too late to change. And this is the reason why I really liked this book. I highly recommended this to anyone who is a book club moderator or even member who wants their book club to last up to their children’s or grandchildren’s time.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-16 00:00:00 Klaus Meyer I am reading the first edition, 1993, significantly different from the 2nd (1995) and 3rd edition (listed here). Goodreads, fix this! The first half of this book -- and I am reviewing the 1993 edition -- is a series of contributions from book club members all over the country, with a distinctive majority from the Chicagoland area. In all of their unique voices, they describe how their book group functions, what its aims are, and what works for them as far as "rules" and expectations of membership. The second half are book lists of specific titles they have read, some of which include notes on how successful or unsuccessful they were at sparking good discussion. Because the book is so old, it's now an artifact of popular literature from the early 90's, highlighting the strange popularity of Ann Tyler, Anne Rice, and Amy Tan, but also listing plenty of classic and timeless book group faves. It's interesting to note the heavy weight of female readers as opposed to male, which comes as no surprise, but it would have been interesting to include at least one all male group -- I'm sure they were out there. I'm in an all male group now, at Oakdale Prison, and find that our discussions, though not often tied to our own emotional lives, are just as sophisticated and resonant. There aren't a whole lot of research studies out there on the dynamics of book groups, but what there is is very interesting. Some notable authors are Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Elizabeth Long and Joan Bessman Taylor, who happens to be my professor at U of Iowa. You can find a chapter by her in Research-Based Readers' Advisorywhich discusses the concepts of discussability and non-appeal in book selection and successful discussion. She studies the strange phenomenon, among other things, of what makes a book we didn't like to read a great book to discuss (and vice-versa), and also investigates how a publisher decides if they will include a "reading group guide" at the end of the book. Good stuff. I understand the 1995 (2nd edition) of The Book Group Book has two submissions by the creators of Changing Lives Through Literature, a program based in Massachusetts that allows probationers to shorten their probation if they complete and pass a 10-week session of bibliotherapy. All they mean by that term is using classic literature in discussion to direct the reader to identify with the character, creating empathy, expanded worldview, and a resonance with their own lives. Massachusetts has been doing this for about 20 years and has been very successful but, to my knowledge, no other state has tried it. Apparently their recidivism rate has lowered by something like 41%. I think it's a shame its not happening during a sentence, but it probably happens all the time individually by those who want it to happen. It's really just a question of temperament, exposure and access. Books change lives.