Book Club Brainstorming

I'm down for this. I think the best way would be to brainstorm a list of books (with reasons for why they'd be good books for discussion - not just reading, but talking about afterward), set up a poll to vote on them, give say two weeks to a month for reading it, then have an open thread to talk about the book we've chosen.

 

O_O IM IN.

I read all the time, but would love to be able to talk about them from time to time. There really arent enough book clubs anymore. So I'm down for any theme'd club. I'm always looking for knew books, though LGBT are hard to find, but if I come across anything promising I'll point it out.

Otherwise, I would love to help with any other organizing and the such .

 

So down!

For people who can't afford an ereader, you can always just download the book straight to you computer, read it and delete it when you're done if you're worried about parental units finding it.

I work in a bookstore, and I can tell you at least in my area it's hard to find lgbt books and often you have to order it if you want it. So I think what we should do is once a month pick a book, we all read it and at the end of the month we discuss it.

But maybe we could work in like, only start reading x book when we know everyone has a copy in some way? That way we can all start around the same time.

 

Do we necessarily want to limit ourselves to LGBT-themed books? Also, do we want to stick to just fiction, or include non-fiction books too?

 

Pick me! Pick me!

I like this idea. I'm a traditionalist, though, don't have an ereader. Good old pulp paper for me, although I do download to my computer if necessary.:smilewave

 

I like Chip's idea. I'm not a big reader, so having to read a whole book in two weeks/a month would be torture.. but I do like reading psychology stuff! That's really interesting. So if a club like that is made, I'm in

 

YES! I'm sooo in!

I'm a big reader, so I won't have any problem reading a book in less than two weeks-seems like a good stretch of time to read it in.

I think we should probably stick to mainly fiction-maybe sometimes non-fiction, but not too often.

Also, I'm willing to help as much as I can-my parents obviously won't know about this, so that's a complication, but I can try!

This sounds so awesome-really great idea!

 

I'm glad there's so much interest in my suggestion! :love:

You'll find the books I've suggested in the LGBT books thread, but since I haven't read all of them I'm afraid I personally can't stick up for them slash offer reasons why we should read them. What I CAN do, if you so require, is provide a brief synopsis.

In other non-LGBT book-related news, I've just finished A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Absolutely terrific - a deserved winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Egan writes so tightly, so economically, yet her prose is brilliantly observed. I'd be more than happy to lead discussion on the novel if we pick that.

Which brings me onto the subject of how we might organise this. Perhaps each member nominates a book to discuss every month. We take a shortlist and poll the books based on the nominations. The person whose book is chosen facilitates the discussion that takes place after the reading period. They will come prepared with questions, topics, themes, that will act as a focal point for our explorations of the book.

I'm quite prepared to venture into 'non-traditional' places like graphic novels, TV series, playscripts, poetry books if people are willing to suggest examples of them.

Hope this helps!

Best,

Dr. F.

 

Neat idea - read a lot of LGBT Lit in the last year (mainly "Young Adult") and now looking for a bit more.

Now I've got my Kindle I have to say I only bother with eBooks now - it's such a great invention and one which means I can finally read "Adult Literature" (not the mucky kind, get your heads out the gutter!) - I've always struggled with the small serif fonts that normally use so end up reading kids books most of the time, which has meant I've not really bothered for the last decade until my dad started getting large print books a couple of years ago and passing them down to me. On the one hand the Kindle makes it makes it easier for me to read (clearer sharper font, better line spacing, and bigger text) and on the other hand you can read stuff without people knowing what you are reading. Since I got it at Christmas I've read more books than in the whole of the last decade! (If you ignore uni text books - 40 so far this year, vs 30 last year and about 1 a year for each of the previous years).

I would make a suggestion of having a cheery book to start with to get us all into the swing of it, I find depressing ones hard going! Probably best to choose ones which are available in both electronic and dead-tree formats to please all participants though.

As for "They will come prepared with questions, topics, themes, that will act as a focal point for our explorations of the book" - hmm, some of us have never been really good at that sort of thing - there's a reason I had to take three attempts to get my GCSE English pass!

 

I would like to join, however I don't have Kindle and would prefer to not read books online if I can help it, so hopefully I could get everything through the library system. Also, I'm kind of divided on having to prepare questions, topics, etc. as well, because I definitely want to have good discussion though like qboy I have trouble with these sorts of things too. However, I've never been in a book club so I don't know how these things usually go.

Apart from that, I have no problem with sticking with LGBT-themed literature [whether novels, plays, poetry, etc.] since I've not read any and would welcome a chance to discover more works. If there is a list/poll of suggestions made, I think each member should be given 'X' number of votes, in the hopes that there will be at least one book all involved want to read.

 

I'll definitely be on-board. I don't have kindle but I can find a simulator though.

 

Lol. This sounds cool, I'm not so into non-fiction though. And I don't really know whatLGBTQ books would be like...
Oh and random fact.....
In the original play Romeo and Juliet were both guys!

---------- Post added 5th Aug 2012 at 10:27 AM ----------

Oh and I do have a kindle

 

ISTR there being something about on men being allowed to do any paid employment back in those days which meant all actors were male regardless of the role. (GSCE English is a longggg time ago - made the more confusing by having the exam in Old English, learning using the English translation, and watching the Baz Lurhman film a few weeks before - I'm sure a gun worked itself into the exam paper - whoops!)

 

I've read only a few Biographies and nonfiction books in my time, if we choose to lean for LGBTQ nonfiction, John Barrowman has two fantastic biographies out, but it may just be for fans like me... & I think a poll would be a good idea, or multiple groups, if some of us don't want to read strictly LGBTQ stuff.

I've also noticed that some of the people who have posted feel like two weeks is too short, and some think its more than enough. I was in something called a "book hookup" once where everyone at the bookstore I work at our names were put into a hat and drawn out in pairs, and whoever you were paired with would pick a random book for you to read. And even though we were all BIG readers with stupidly huge collections of books, we all still needed a month to read the book we were given, sometimes more because for some of us we have work and school and other stuff to do in our lives, and we don't always have time to read. That's why I think a month would be better than just a week or two.

 

^ I second what MusicIsLife just said regarding times. If I really like a book, I could easily read it within a couple of days, but when school starts back up a lot of us are going to be busy and have other commitments that do come first unfortunately. A month gives me say, 4 weekday nights where I'm not busy, or 1 weekend where I'm not scheduled to work where I can dedicate that time to read.

Otherwise, I'm down for this, it sounds like it could be really fun if it gets organized well. I think for book topics, if we're going over longer (month-long) spans, maybe it would be easier to stick with LGBT-books. I mean, that's something that (presumably) the majority of us have some interest in, and can obviously all discuss. If we're only getting to read 12 books over the course of a year, I think it should be more of an "all or nothing" kind of deal. Maybe 12 different topics altogether, for variety.

If anyone's interested, a non-LGBT book that's on my list of reading material is "Ready Player One" by uh... I can't remember who at the minute (I haven't actually gotten the book yet). It seems like it'd be interesting for the moderately-nerdy base we have here at EC too.

LGBT-books? I'm reading "Will Grayson, Will Grayson" right now, and it's pretty good. I like that (so far, at least) it's a book that has LGBT stuff in it, rather than an LGBT-book, if you get what I mean.

 

Should we be submitting possible choices now?