A New Book Club!

I’ve wanted for years to join a book club. I love to read, but sort of like running I wont necessarily find the time to do it unless I have a race as a goal…or, in this case, a book club assignment! The last time I really read a lot of books was in 2010 & 2011 after I had inherited my high school friend’s books when she passed away and I went through every one before donating them. It was fun to whittle down the pile on my dresser from what looked massive to those last few.

But since then I started my copy writing venture and then volunteered for football team duties and took up running and…yeah..book reading has fallen away again. Then over the holiday break a new friend from football and I were on Facebook commenting on another mutual friends’ page about how jealous we were over her 10+ year long book club groups and could we join and…? Aw shoot, they were too full (of course), so we decided to just go out on our own and start one! A leap of faith! We had a quick discussion about what we generally liked, then I got luck when a twitter friend recommended a book and we had our first one picked! I had a third person in mind to ask about joining and she was in too!

Our book is The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. (Amazon link here)

We will get together later this month for our inaugural meeting. I am sure it will be much more about sipping wine and getting to know each other (the other two have never met and the longest I’ve known either of them is 14 mos) so it anticipate that the book itself will barely be discussed.

OTOH, since it is historical fiction we’ve already talked about how we all had to look up some of the references in the plot because we had no idea how critical these people’s roles had been in reality! It seems that 25-30 years removed from history classes means some details may have slipped away…shocking eh?

So – how many of you are in book clubs? We anticipate that ours will be VERY casual with little, if no, rules as far as choosing books and making presentations and such. I am curious about what other people do though. I also look forward to having books assigned by other members that might push me to read something outside my comfort zone and perhaps discover a new author or genre that I wouldn’t otherwise have chosen.

If you want to join in virtually – please do! I wont review the book here until we’ve had our gathering in a couple of weeks so that I can share the other perspectives too.