Hrm. You could put up a sign at the library! “Cool literary women wanted for book club. Monthly meetings with rich desserts.” Well, I’d sign up. Or do you have a nice little independent bookstore where such a sign might do well? Practically everyone seems to belong to a book club these days; ask your co-workers if any of them have one. Or, Barnes&Noble runs a bunch of them for various genres–start going and see if you can form a breakaway group? Or, grab your one girlfriend, make her grab another one, and so on…anyway good luck.
Hey, I bet there are books on this. There are lots of ‘book-club suggestion’ books around, I bet one will address this too. (Do you have kids? Mom/daughter clubs are all the rage, and you can meet other moms, maybe…my kids aren’t old enough to read so I haven’t tried it myself.)
Well, if you were in the Twin Cities, you could come to mine.
Do your male friends have wives/girlfriends? They may be a start. We’ve brought in a woman or two into our club because they were the wives/girlfriends of our guy friends?
I started mine out of college. I invited a girl I knew with literary tastes and a wide circle of friends to start it with me, as I knew a lot of people, but needed her popularity (and I liked her and thought it would be fun). We made a list of twenty or so women we knew who we thought liked to read, picked a book (Cider House Rules) and sent out invitations. About four people came. Some of those four still come, some have drifted off. We’ve all come and gone for periods of time. We’ve probably had fifty different “members” or more over ten years, though now there is a core group of six to ten of us - most of us have been around for years.
Bookstores and libraries are often a starting point - as are churches, clubs, coworkers, universities. One of our members is Wiccan and her coven has a “feminist pagan” bookclub, two other of our members are in more “serious” bookclubs through work (no one reads more serious books than we do - we read Backlash, Le Morte de Arthur (ok, we all bought Le Morte de Arthur, some of us read several pages and the Cliff Notes), and A Brief History of Time), we just don’t have any rule that you have to read them to come).
Our rules are simple - we don’t care if you’ve read the book or even picked it up. We start at 7:00 and once everyone seems to have gotten there (7:30 or so) we talk about the book. If the conversation carries us, great. If we’d rather talk about potty training or work problems or a book we read two years ago or some guy we all think is hot, that’s ok, thats what we talk about. (We seldom spend more than fifteen minutes talking about the book). This would drive a lot of bookclubs crazy, but ours is more about the friendships than the books (most of us do read the books) - and we discovered that when we wanted people to have finished the book, they’d drop and loose track - they didn’t feel like they could come if they couldn’t discuss the book. At 9:00 or so we break out dessert (beverages of hot tea, ice water, wine, or whatever have been served all evening - and sometimes munchies). We try and get out of the house by 10:00, but its Minnesota and the Minnesota goodbye, the last person is out by 11:00.
Well, the trifle was a hit. The book was popular (and yeah, we don’t care if you read it either. No one would come if you had to have read it, 'cause most of us have a hard time carving out enough time for a light novel), we talked about everything else and even about the book some, and next month is Cold Comfort Farm.
I wish I could get a second club that did heavy stuff too (Morte de Arthur, how cool is that), but I only know a couple people who would join, and one is currently working on a master’s and has four children and I’m not even sure when she breathes.
Cold Comfort Farm is hee-larious, dangermom. The humor is in the some vein as To Say Nothing of the Dog. The movie version is actually one of my favorite comedies and follows the book fairly closely.
Thanks for the suggestions on finding a book club. Once I get my garden started (my current big project), I may try some of them out.
Yeah, they are both favorites of mine. I was the one who wound up suggesting the title–the next person had to go early, and we hadn’t decided and were just tossing around ideas, and thought we’d like another funny book. I currently have the movie on my list at Netflix, so that’s how I thought of it. We’ll have some great fun next month.
And hey, we were thinking we hadn’t read anything with any sex in it lately. Anyone have anything with some sex that’s not stupid, gross, or a Harlequin novel? (Not The red tent.)
We read High Fidelity fairly recently. It had some sex in it, but it wasn’t sexy. We all enjoyed the book a lot. It also isn’t too serious. We talked about that one a lot.
Years ago we read a trashy bodice ripping novel - after we’d read a whole bunch of feminism stuff. Made a nice contrast.
We read Nicholson Baker’s Vox (the book Monica gave Clinton, though I’d read it before then). That’s pretty erotic (its a book about phone sex). But it made for a very interesting conversation.
(Not The red tent.)