Reflections on Running a Book Club

('Run a book club', they said. 'It will be good', they said. 'It will help you make likeminded friends', they said...)

2024/04/24

I decided to create a book club at my high school whenever I was about fourteen, because there wasn't one and I thought that maybe if there was, it would attract interesting people for me to meet and potentially befriend. The school librarian liked my idea, so we made one together, and she generally ran things alone for the first few years.

Eventually, I reached my final year at the school, and the librarian retired. I was asked by the English department at my school to take over managing the club myself: creating posters and making announcements, managing the budget, sourcing and ordering books, planning meetings, communicating with members, writing up schedules, leading discussions, and so on.

I agreed, because even though I knew by now that the club probably wouldn't attract the kind of people who actually wanted to have discussions with me about philosophy, theology, or classic literature (how naive of me to think there were many such people in the first place, never mind in a high school), I thought it was a club that the school should have anyway.

The management side of running the club went smoothly, and budgeting was easier than anticipated due to a library grant and websites that offer secondhand books, which I strongly recommend using instead of ordering new books. Aside from that, though, I think the greatest challenge I faced wasn't interest in the club itself (because there was a substantial amount of people who were interested), but rather maintaining a clear focus during meetings and establishing a group who cared for the same kind of literature.

Those who wanted to read the classics were a very scarce minority, and most of the people attracted (again, this was in a high school) based their taste in books off of whatever was most popular on TikTok that week. (If I have to hear the term 'BookTok' one more time I am going to commit a violent crime.)

Besides the fact that I have very little patience for such people (and such books; I tried reading several during my time running the club and they were all equally trite nonsense), this made actually establishing one single reading group very difficult. The solution we decided on was by splitting the club into two smaller reading groups at a time, and offering a selection of two books (usually one classic and one contemporary) based on a set list determined democratically every few months. Some of the books chosen were as follows:

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky
• Call Me By Your Name - Andre Aciman
• A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• Lord of the Flies - William Golding
• A Man Called Ove - Fredrik Backman
• The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Woodlanders - Thomas Hardy
• They Both Die at the End - Adam Silvera

Ultimately, it wasn't an overly painful endeavour, and I did have some lovely discussions on different occasions, but it often felt futile because people had such varied interests in what they wanted to read. If I were to compile a short list of advice for anyone who plans on creating a book club, it would look like this:

• Decide on a clear theme. Split up into smaller groups if you need to, but try to avoid this by making sure the book club is advertised as having a very clear focus — an explicitly science fiction oriented group, for example, will not face anywhere near as many issues in regards to difficulty deciding on which books to read, and will maintain far more interest;
• Always use secondhand book sites to source your books, if you have to source them yourself, as they're generally far cheaper, it's probably better environmentally, and there's really no reason not to;
• Don't dive straight into classics (if it's a more general group) unless you know they're very engaging or have some unique appeal, as many of them will feel very dull and tedious to read for many members who may not be used to the style of writing (Hardy does not tend to amuse teenagers, and Golding bored me to death);
• Opt for books that you know will have a lot of material to discuss, such as philosophy books, literature dabbling in unique literary techniques (such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower, composed in a letter format), or books that discuss some poignant or controversial topic (like Lolita, or To Kill a Mockingbird);
• It's better to have a small group of members who actually care about engaged discussion and a similar kind of literature than many members in one disjointed, generally dissatisfied whole. Having too many members will make discussion less directed and less coherent;
• You will almost never find a schedule or day that works perfectly for everyone, so cut your losses and pick the best you can;
• Prepare discussion points or questions in advance so that the meeting maintains a clear focus, rather than meandering away from the book itself. This also prevents any potential awkward silences;
• Do your best to give everyone a voice in which books you decide on reading, so they don't start to see the club reading as a chore. Involve everyone by voting as a group, and then whittle it down through a process of elimination if required;
• Offer EPUBs and PDFs of books where appropriate if anyone doesn't want to purchase them and you can't source them and lend them out yourself;
• Create some kind of group chat for ease of communication and sharing of schedules. You can also use these to easily create polls and gauge interest in different books.