[Publib] RE: (Publib) If you run a book club...

[Brzozowski, Bonnie]

I always either prepare questions or use questions I can find in a
reader's guide, but now that I'm doing a graphic novels book club, I
usually have to prepare my own questions (they don't normally have
guides).  I never hand out the questions I intend to ask (beforehand or
the day of) and much of the time I use them as talking points rather
than actual posed questions.  I like the conversation to be casual and
spontaneous, and I think so far my group members have too, so I would
not feel very comfortable handing out questions ahead of time (though, I
would consider handing them out at the beginning of one of our meetings,
if someone was insistent).  Additionally, I often find that the day of
the book club creeps up on me and I wind up creating the questions only
shortly before our meetings, so being obliged to hand them out
beforehand would be a challenge for me.

Bonnie Brzozowski

Reference Librarian

Faulk Central Library

Austin Public Library System

800 Guadalupe Street

Austin, TX 78701

(512) 974-7360

http://www.cityofaustin.org/library

 

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Message: 4

Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 13:15:35 -0700 (PDT)

From: Sharon Dalton <bomberlibrarygoddess at yahoo.com>

Subject: [Publib] If you run a book club...

To: publib at webjunction.org

Message-ID: <413840.4159.qm at web32706.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Do you give the questions out to your participants in advance?  I know
that some books have the questions in the book already, but what do you
do when the questions aren't printed in the book?  

The back story:

I have been running one of the book clubs here at my library on a
volunteer basis for a decade.  We all enjoy reading the books and
discussing them, but it is all very low-key and casual. When the
questions are available in the book, no one in the group reads them
anyway.  We just come to the meeting and respond to the questions as I
present them. If questions aren't availabe in the book, no one cares
because we don't read them in advance.

Now I am working at the library and I am running another book club. We
are in our third month.  A member left me a note saying she wanted the
questions in advance so "we can discuss the book more intelligently".
My concern with this is that she is going to prepare her answers in
advance with passages and so on.  It might make others feel like they
need to do that too, and then they might drop out because they wanted to
join a book club, not a Grad School Literature Seminar. 

What do you do with your groups?  Do you prepare your answers in advance
or do you just keep things more casual?

 

Sharon Dalton

Sayreville Public Library

Parlin, NJ

BomberLibraryGoddess at yahoo.com

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