Good Books for Book Clubs

Video Transcript

"My name is Jeanna Rock and we're talking about books that you can choose for your book group. When I organized my book group, I wanted to have a variety of books available to discuss. I didn't want to just discuss novels, I wanted to discuss nonfiction as well. So we set up categories that we chose from every year. And my book group chooses their books as a whole. We vote on the books that we're going to read that year. Now not all book groups do that. I know other book groups, each individual member gets to choose a book and they present that book throughout the years. And other book groups, particularly public ones, will decide on a book themselves and then everyone will read that. And you really don't have a lot of input as a member of that group. I think membership or group input is very important in choosing books because you want to have books that everyone is interested in reading. I like to have a nonfiction book in my repertoire of books. And we try also to read books from other cultures. We have a multi-cultural category in our books. We're reading books from voices that we don't necessarily hear in the United States. Our book group also likes to do a young adult novel every year so that we're aware of what our children are reading as well. The popular novels of the time are not always going to be good book group books. You need a book that you can actually talk about and discuss. Sometimes the most controversial were the most popular ones in our book group. One book that I particularly loved reading was In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien. It was a book ripe for discussion because some people hated the book and other people loved the book. It also had a very ambiguous ending. So we argued about how it really ended. And it was probably one of the best discussions that we ever had. So try to find books that have a lot of meat to them and are not too superficial because you'll have a better discussion if you do that."