Book Club Experience

Some of my college friend and I had the idea to start a book club a few months ago. The interest in forming the book club was partly social, partly gastronomic, but mostly a chance for good discussion. We have met twice now, each meeting being around six weeks apart. When we were discussing forming the group, we did not have a specific theme in mind for the types of books we’d like to read, but each person had a book or two that they had either read recently and wanted to discuss or that they were interested in reading.

Many of the books people suggested were nonfiction, related to current societal issues like racism and capitalism, so the first book we chose to read was We Were Eight Years In Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which is a series of essays about race and racism written throughout Barack Obama’s presidency. All of us in the group are pretty progressive and largely on the same page politically, but we are also a group of white people and part of the aim of the book club was to provide accountability for each other as we try to stay educated about racism and our privilege.  

We decided that we would each come up with some questions to bring to our first book discussion to get the conversation moving. This was a good idea, and lines up with the recommendation on the I Love Libraries page “Facilitating Discussion” (2015) to take notes while reading the book and bring them to the book club to spark discussion. This strategy would have worked better, however, if we had all done a better job of following another of the recommendations on that page to support our opinions with specific quotations from the book and with page numbers. We often found ourselves making vague assertions that were difficult to discuss because we did not have a specific quote or context to dig into.

Although we all enjoyed the book and brought plenty of ideas to discuss from it, our first book club meeting (as well as the subsequent one) have been frustrating because one of our group members is what I Love Libraries’ “Structuring Your Meeting” page (2015) describes as a “dominating personality.” The makeup of our group is three women and two men (one of which is me). The other man in the group dominated the entire conversation nonstop. He was always the first to respond when anyone else asked a question to the group, and his responses tended to be lengthy and full of long pauses; he just generally took up a lot of space. What’s more, he had a tendency (as many men do) to address the questions he asked the group directly to me, the other man. I did my best to respond to his questions when he asked them directly to me, but as this pattern continued to happen I began trying to give a brief answer and then divert the conversation another way by asking one of the women in the group a question. I could tell that the women in the group got more and more uncomfortable with the discussion as it progressed because of how central the man’s presence was to everything that was said. Eventually I decided to just stop responding altogether to any questions the man asked the group in order to allow the women in the group to respond when they felt comfortable doing so. This led to some long, uncomfortable silences in which the man would pose a question and nobody would respond. He seemed to be uncomfortable with the silences, so he would just respond to his own question when this happened.

The difficult thing about this situation is that we are all friends outside of the book club, but something about the construct of an organized space for discussion brings out the dominating personality in this man. Because of our relationships with one another, it has been difficult to broach the topic with him, and since our second book club meeting there has not been any talk of a third one. I think the book club could still end up working, but we would need to establish some more ground rules, and I think it might be valuable to follow the advice on the I Love Libraries “Structuring Your Meetings” page (2015) and assign a group leader for each meeting to better moderate the discussion. I also wonder if part of the problem is that we’ve been reading nonfiction so far. This dominating friend is very academic-minded and fond of debate, and nonfiction books might bring out this in him more than a good novel. It may also be valuable to just try and schedule a meeting without him to see how it goes, but that could quickly lead to hurt feelings.

My book club experience has been a tricky one to navigate, but I am still drawn to the potential conversations we might have if we can better moderate them.

References

Facilitating Discussion. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.ilovelibraries.org/booklovers/bookclub/facilitate-discussion

Structuring Your Meeting. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.ilovelibraries.org/booklovers/bookclub/structure-meeting