Welcome, Readers!

Why "Better Book Clubs"?

The name of this newsletter is Better Book Clubs because my intention is to help book clubs become stronger readers, with livelier discussions, in groups that hold together and function year after year. But a lot of what I’ll be sharing here will be useful and entertaining for individual readers, too. So, first, I ask you to open up your mind about what constitutes a “book club.”

“Club” obviously implies a group of people. But those people are not necessarily gathering in a living room or café or church basement once a month to talk about a particular book. They might be conversing in the comments section of #BookTube videos or on Twitter or on Goodreads. They might be friends having an unplanned conversation about a book over lunch. They might be a group of people who haven’t even met each other in person but are conversing over Zoom.

There are lots of ways to share your thoughts about books with others. Still, if you were to ask me whether I belong to a “book club,” I would probably tell you no. I haven’t belonged to anything that looks like a traditional book club for years. I visited more than two dozen book clubs after my own novel, A Violet Season, was published back in 2012, and I loved talking with them and seeing how many different versions of “book club” there were. But for many years I was teaching, and I had to do so much assigned reading for school—even if I was the one assigning it—that I really didn’t want a book club assigning my pleasure reading.

That doesn’t mean I’m not reading in community with others. For many years, I’ve dipped in and out of a group on Goodreads called Classics and the Western Canon. I don’t want to read exclusively classics, but once or twice a year, they choose a classic that I really want to read but might not read on my own. I enjoy sharing a discussion with a group of smart, interesting people willing to dig into the nuances of a challenging book like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain over the course of many weeks.

Likewise, over the past couple of years my husband and I have been tackling some big books (from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair to Wallace’s Infinite Jest) with a group of friends and discussing them by email, ending with a Zoom call. He and I have enjoyed making YouTube videos along the way for viewers of my channel—also called Better Book Clubs.

Neither of these is a conventional book club, and neither of them is regularly scheduled, but they offer me the enjoyment of discussing books with other readers. Honestly, teaching is also a strange version of a book club. Over my 23 years in high school and college classrooms, my students taught me over and over again to see what we were reading in new ways.

If you are literally a lone reader—because there are those who prefer it that way—then I hope you’ll still find some nuggets of interest in Better Book Clubs. I read a lot of books on my own, too, that I never talk about with anybody. In that case, I’m often jotting down notes and impressions in a reading journal, partly because that helps me stay focused and remember what I’ve read. It also creates a sort of conversation with myself, both present and future.

Regardless of what kind of book club you belong to, even if it’s a “club” of one, here’s what you’ll get with your free subscription to Better Book Clubs:

Wednesdays: What I’m Reading—a quick paragraph on what I’m reading that week and my impressions. Not a book review, just some thoughts and an invitation to pile on with comments on what you’re reading, too.

Sundays: A longer feature on an issue of interest to book clubs. These might include tips for running a better book club; tips for reading a classic novel with your book club or on your own; author interviews; literary photo essays; videos from my YouTube channel; book-and-movie pairing critiques—who knows!

Occasionally: I’ll be in touch with news or a special offer.

I’ll be interested to hear from you what you like and don’t like about Better Book Clubs and how I can make this newsletter literally and literarily helpful to you. Read on!

P.S. I’ll be posting a lot of my own photos, not stock stuff. This one clues you in to one of my favorite novels. Maybe it’s one of yours, too.