I was so nervous about book club for a lot of reasons.
1) Our home is small.
2) I had never hosted a group this large.
3) I have never hosted a book club.
So I was learning a lot of new things.
First thing I did was clear the living room. Thanks to our anniversary dinner, I knew that our couch could fit in the closet. So during nap time, I moved all of our living room furniture out of the room. The kids had so much fun playing in there. We kicked balls and painted it was great!
Then at 6, Baby X got picked up and I got to work. Matt had come home a little early to grab chairs that we were borrowing from the community room. We only have enough seats for 4 people, so it was either that or sitting on the floor. It worked great!
Matt tried to put Madeleine down for bed before leaving to teach a class. Madeleine popped out of bed right before the first person came. Out of 20 people that signed up for book club, 7 came. That's pretty good right?
We discussed the basic rules of our club and then started chatting about the book. I had notes and questions prepared beforehand, but we ended just talking about whatever we felt like in the book. This book has so many different discussion topics and we had plenty to talk about. We talked for an hour about it before people needed to go home. Most people told me after that they still had a lot that they wanted to discuss. That's good right?
I'm not sure if everyone liked it, but I enjoyed it. I think the lack of structure would have not done as well with even a slightly larger group. I'm not sure how to handle that in the future. I think I'm going to drop in on one of the library's clubs and see how they handle it. The only one I can go to is the mystery one, which is one of my least favorite genres.
The book we are reading next month is Free Range Kids. It's technically a parenting book but I think it says a lot about our culture's lack of media literacy. I'm excited for it.
Any tips for how to run larger groups? What have you found is the best way to have discussions?
I don't know if I've mentioned this, but this past year I took over running our neighborhood book club (though it somehow mostly ends up being ward members that live in the complex...there's a lot of us!). We have about 15 women on the roster and usually have 7-10 at any given meeting. The way we do it is that each month, a different women signs up to pick the book and lead the discussion. I like that because we all get to choose a book we want to read, as well as all get practice leading a discussion. This means that those of us (like me!) that sometimes don't know quite what to say to get others discussing get more practice helping them, and people that are better at it get to show us how it's done ;) Anyways, that's just how we do it and it works well for us! I hope your book club continues to go well :D
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