Book Club Experience

I attended a book club at one of the branches of my local library. It happens every first Monday in the evenings at 6:30PM and lasts about an hour. It wasn't difficult for me to find as they were meeting in the community room at the library. I hadn't read the book they were discussing, The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett, but I was still welcomed into the group and given opportunity to talk if I wanted. It was a small group, about 8 of us total counting myself and the lady leading it.

We each had a little paper name tag in front of our seat at the table to help learn names as they started the discussion. First they went around in the circle so that everyone who wished to had a chance to talk about their general thoughts about the book. This took about the first fifteen minutes or so, and it seemed like there were mixed reviews about the book. A few had a hard time getting into it at first, some liked the book, however it seemed that the common feeling here was that no one liked the main character. The discussion naturally seemed to continue on it's own, many of the readers had questions of their own that they'd like the group to discuss although it seemed that the lady facilitating had also prepared some questions just in case the discussion needed any encouraging.

For this book, however, there seemed to be plenty to discuss. They spoke about the characters as if they were real people and seemed to complete a character analysis on at least half the characters in the book to try to figure out their motivations. Two people seemed pretty riled up about how much they hated the protagonist and wondered why they were reading the book in the first place and they used plenty of examples from the book to back up their feelings. The people that enjoyed the book weren't able to defend the protagonist - the consensus was she wasn't a good person - but instead of disliking it they took it as more of an intrigue because the character clearly had a lot of issues. Even though I hadn't read the book it didn't take long for me to be able to follow along and not be lost in the conversation. This book seemed to have been the idea of the facilitator to read because she talked about having read the book years ago and had so many questions, so it seemed like a good title meant for deep discussion.

As the conversation started to dwindle down they facilitator passed around a sheet of paper so that everyone could write down book titles and authors they'd like the book club to discuss. Then later the club would vote from that list to assign books to later months this year. Next month the club will be reading a nonfiction book, so it looks like they are pretty open to a variety of titles and don't stick to a genre or type of book.

I haven't attended a book club since I was probably a kid. Going to one as an adult was nice and welcoming, although it did remind me a lot of a literature class (the book club was much more enjoyable).