How to lead
A Book Club
How to Hold Good Book Club Discussions - Better Book Clubs
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let's talk about how to hold a good book
club discussion I visited dozens of book
clubs and I keep hearing the same
frustration over and over again we can't
sustain a conversation about the book
for more than 15 or 20 minutes so today
I'm going to give you some tips on how
to have a better longer more interesting
book club discussion the first trick is
just to get the gossip out of the way
upfront a lot of book clubs are social
groups and they want to have time to
catch up with each other maybe you
haven't seen each other for the past
month so just allow 20 or 30 minutes or
however long is good for your group at
the beginning when you're first arriving
to sit down relax catch up with each
other and get some of the chat and
gossip out of the way if you find that
it's really hard to sustain a
conversation because that gossiping and
chatting continues on into the meeting
it may be that you need to diversify
your group invite some people who aren't
part of the inner circle so a lot of
book clubs are designed around a
religious organization or a neighborhood
or work and if everybody has those
connections then it's easy to get sucked
into discussion about things in your
lives outside of the book that you've
read but if you each invite somebody
from another part of your life into the
book club you'll have a diverse enough
group of people that the thing that
binds you is then the books that you've
read and not other things that you're
drawn to talk about together
the second thing to ask yourselves is
whether you're choosing the right books
to talk about not every book bears
discussion for more than 15 or 20
minutes so maybe you're just choosing
books that don't have enough meat to
them this is tricky because books that
are really enjoyable and fun and easy to
read tend to be the books that we don't
have that much to say about when we're
finished whereas a book that offers some
more unique challenges or raises some
more interesting issues or just requires
more thought and conversation is going
to be a book that's going to work better
for
Club discussion so think about the books
that you've been choosing and whether
the kinds of books you've been choosing
maybe part of the problem I have another
whole video that you can view on how to
choose the right books for your book
club so take a look at that as well if
you think that's part of your problem
another suggestion is to actually
appoint someone to lead the discussion
and it has to be somebody who really
enjoys leading the discussion so you may
find that you have just a couple of
people in your book club who actually
like doing that if you want to pass that
job around for month to month and
everybody agrees on that that's fine but
don't feel that you have to do that if
there are some people who enjoy doing it
more and who are better at it another
thing is to have that person who's in
charge of discussion really think
through ahead of time some questions
that are going to elicit good
conversation I have another whole video
on this topic but I'll caution you here
don't rely on the discussion guides in
the back of books they're not usually
very good and now the hard question are
you with the right book club if you're
really the only one who's reading the
books who's really invested in talking
about the books it may be that what you
belong to is a social club where books
are the excuse for getting together
there's nothing wrong with that keep
meeting with that group have a glass of
wine and some conversation every month
but in order to talk about books you may
have to go and look for another book
club or possibly create one yourself if
you have other suggestions about how
you've gotten your book club to talk
more about the books please post them
below and share them with the rest of us
read on
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