After several years of liking one another’s Goodreads and Facebook statuses, my cousins and I finally had the brilliant idea to start a family book club. Virtual, of course, as we are spread around South and Central Florida, Virginia, and New Jersey.
The only problem is, with such varied schedules and reading speeds, picking one book to share proved difficult. So, what’s the solution? For our first month’s meeting, we agreed to each read our own book and bring it with us to the Google Hangouts session.
Things were off to a rough start, as no one made it to the originally agreed upon date. If we couldn’t manage to set time aside to do a video chat together, how would we ever read a book together?
The experiment turned out to be a success though. After a couple of days of flopping around, trying to make our schedules jive, we finally started our video chat and exchanged our thoughts on our individual books.
We asked each other questions and discussed new perspectives, and all without having read the same book. There was a medley of genres, with one cousin bringing literary fiction and a fairy tale retelling, another cousin bringing a murder mystery and a true crime book, and still another cousin bringing comic books into the mix, while I myself brought a classic satire and work in translation.
It didn’t turn into a confusing and disorganized stew as I’d originally feared it might. Instead, we got a taste of different works and thoughtful discussion, like going to a buffet and trying a little bit of everything.
I’ve never done a book club before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but our modified version turned into a fun and exciting adventure that left us wanting more. We agreed to do the same thing again for the next month and then try a joint book venture the month after, with a graphic novel or comic book series so that those of us with less time on our hands or shorter attention spans could still keep up with the reading schedule.
For any book clubbers out there, I highly recommend giving our cousins’ book club experiment a spin and instead of everyone reading the same book, read different books and start a conversation. It was such a fascinating result that made me excited to be a part of the reading community.
Do any of you participate in a book club? What is your format? Let me know in the comments!
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