Books, Readers and Beyond: #54 Social Networking Through Books

Exercise 1: Membership in Book Clubs

I joined my first book club in the late 70's when I lived in Illinois. Those were the years when I was working for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and I met a bunch of terrific like-minded people. Some of us formed a feminist book club, named the Gutsy Women. This was a wonderful bonding among friends, and as I think about it now, it may have influenced my decision to become a librarian later. I had been on a science track before this, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Entomology. All I read was serious non-fiction, and I thought of reading as hard work. The Gutsy Women showed me that reading fiction was an acceptable pastime for intelligent people, and that reading could be fun. I was hooked.

Today I facilitate two books clubs, one at the Barbara Bush Library, and one at my church, Hosanna Lutheran. They are quite different from each other, but both are enjoyable. I would love to start more book clubs, but I am a sadly slow reader, and two required books a month is about all I can handle in addition to my personal reading.

I love the fast-paced face-to-face unpredictable interaction between readers discussing a good book, and I would never consider joining an online book club (unless perhaps I was homebound and couldn't get out).

Exercise 2: Implementing Book Clubs

I am helping to implement book clubs today by doing training for book club discussion leaders. This is offered as part of the "Big Read" grant happening from mid-April through May. The training session open to the public is on Friday, April 24, from 10 am to noon at the Barbara Bush Library. Any staff member who would like to offer this training at their own branch can contact me. I can do the training, help you do the training, or provide the materials for you to do the training yourself. The "Big Read" training will be focused on the classic book "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, but this training could be done at any time of the year, using any book.

The library book club that I host reads a wide variety of materials, from various fiction genres to non-fiction selections. The suggestions come from the participants. You can see what we have read by visiting our Library Thing site. Log in as "bushbookclub", password "barbara". By clicking on the tab for "Your Library", you can see the books this group has read and discussed over the last six years.

Books on Social Networking Sites

I searched again for "The Guide" by R.K. Narayan, as discussed in my first post for this exercise, with these results:

GoodReads: a rating of 3.9 out of 5.0, based on 282 ratings.

Shelfari: a rating of 4.0 out of 5.0, including 21 reviews

Library Thing: a rating of 3.61 out of 5.0, based on 343 entries; no reviews.

Books on Facebook: I had trouble finding this group on Facebook. The first one I found had comments all in Italian. The second was a controlled membership group that you had to be invited to join. All in all, this was not a user-friendly experience.

The sites where I found ratings were quite similar. It sounds like "The Guide" is a "pretty good" book, and one that I will want to read in-between book club selections!