Good Book Club, Bad Book Club

Sometimes it happens --- a book club meeting just doesn't go well. And sometimes they're among the most memorable discussions. RGG.com contributor Heather Johnson's group, Storie delle Sorelle, recently experienced this in back-to-back meetings, and today she talks about these two extremes.


Most months my book club meetings are fantastic --- great friends, great conversation, everything goes smoothly --- but from time to time we have duds. Our August and September meetings are perfect examples of those two extremes.

Near the end of August we met to discuss The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Most of our members attended this meeting so we had a great crowd. The weather was gorgeous and we all enjoyed sitting around the pool. We even had three guests attend, all of whom fit in quite well.

The discussion couldn't have been better. We talked about the epistolary form of the novel --- who liked it, who didn't, and why. We discussed the characters --- were they fully developed, and who were our favorites? We talked about the history of Guernsey, an island in the English Channel --- what we'd known before versus what we learned from the novel. Near the end of the meeting I was able to share insight from an interview I conducted with co-author Annie Barrows that shed some light on our discussions. All in all, an excellent day.

In September we met to discuss C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, the story of two princesses and the struggle between sacred and profane love. We were all looking forward to an outdoor Happy Hour complete with margaritas to help us celebrate the official end of summer. In reality, however, the weather was rather cool and so windy our napkins kept blowing away. Only five people made it to the meeting; of that number, one didn't finish reading and one didn't read at all. This has happened before, but it isn't common...and it is usually a sign that the book wasn't a hit.

Those of us who did read the book disliked it to varying degrees. We tried to discuss the plot, the characters and our reactions to it all, but every topic fell flat until we finally realized that we'd rather talk about anything else but this book. In part that was due to having too few fully engaged participants (more people who had read the book would definitely have led to a better discussion), but it was also due to the book itself; we were simply ready to be done with it.

So instead of book talk we sipped our drinks, chatted about our lives, got pulled into yet another conversation about whether Twilight is worth reading, and simply enjoying being together...until the black clouds rolled in about 15 minutes later. At that point we realized we hadn't gotten to the administrative issues were had planned to discuss at this meeting. It was too late to fix that, though; in the end we barely made it to our cars before the skies opened up on us.

I think every club has these kinds of meetings from time to time, meetings where all your careful preparation amounts to nothing in the end. Hopefully you also have great meetings where everything falls into place perfectly. My suggestion for the bad times is to make the best of the time you have together with your club and simply realize that your next meeting is bound to be better. Of course, if EVERY meeting is like this then you've got a real problem...

My club's next meeting is coming up soon and we'll be discussing Kevin Roose's The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University. Will this meeting be a success? We'll just have to wait and see...but I'm pretty confident it will be great.

---Heather Johnson