Start one
You should start a book club.
Aside from finally reading the books that have been on your to-read list for years, there are two good reasons.
Firstly, book clubs foster connections. As we age, friendships tend to rely on external projects. Intentionally cultivating these connections is a worthy goal in and of itself. It certainly beats bowling alone.
Secondly, book clubs help us better understand the book. Actually read it. Gain insight. Accrete knowledge. Remember. All the good stuff.
Choosing a book
There’s a few considerations when choosing a book. You want to be optimizing for people’s emotional connection both to the sessions and the readings. There might be a tension here. Easier books may be less generative in discussions.
For your first book, you may want to lean on the shortish (or easyish) side of the ledger. Members won’t resent you for slowly ruining their lives. If your group is full of voracious readers, then easy might translate to boring. In that case, hit something difficult straight off the bat.
We all have a list of books we’ve been meaning to read but haven’t found the time in between work, exercising, cooking, and Twitter. Just choose one of those.
My group has a spreadsheet where we input suggestions. We can veto them (if we’ve already read them or we just don’t fancy reading Ulysses). We can also signal if we’re super keen. If there’s concordance, simply pick the book that everyone’s keen on.
Another option is different members choose a book each time. This can add serendipity to your reading diet.
In terms of length, book clubs are good for all shapes and sizes. Here’s some of the book club readings I’ve done:
Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (250 pages)
Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch (30 pages)
DFW's Infinite Jest (1,000 pages)
Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions (400 pages)
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (800 pages)
The reason size doesn’t matter is because you can break up the book club into incremental sessions.
Break up the book
Not literally. Although I do know someone who cut up his copy of Infinite Jest.
I recommend multiple sessions per book. Split up the journey. This small tweak is what made book clubs really click for me.
I prefer meeting weekly. But fortnightly works fine.
I’d also suggest having a regular day. This helps with routine and habit. If this is too difficult due to scheduling (on more to come later), then your job as the host is to clearly communicate ahead of time when the session is landing. Give reminders.
Multiple sessions has two main benefits:
They work as a commitment device
They help to better internalize the book
As a commitment device
One of the biggest problems with book clubs is sometimes people haven’t done the reading. (Remember, it’s important to do the readings.) This can have a contagion effect. Sometimes everybody hasn’t done the reading by the required deadline. It can feel like meetings are incessantly postponed.
To be less daunting, it’s best to go through the book slowly. Commit to a number of pages each week that is easy to manage. I’ve been successful with an amount that translates to 10-20 pages per day. I will often literally stick to X pages per day as a habit. Iterate the pace if it feels too fast or slow1.
70-150 pages per week makes it possible for people to do in a few hours on the weekend if they have to. But reading a smaller number per day is best: Hit your ten pages. You can build an atomic habit for life. Fast readers can just read other things concurrently. Or re-read. Nabokov said that reading is really re-reading anyway.
Big books will require more sessions which could be a problem for some members. It will be easier to find people to sign up for a month than half a year. Especially if they’re new to reading groups. You may want to leave door stoppers like Infinite Jest for later sessions. But if people are keen, go for it.
You can always abandon a badly chosen book although people will have resistance.
To better internalize a book
A sad fact about reading is that we are in a constant state of forgetting.
Most readers are familiar with the feeling when, after having finished a book we genuinely enjoyed, we go to tell someone about it and only remember a vague outline we could have gotten from Wikipedia. Maybe a detail or two.
Reminiscent of Woody Allen after reading War and Peace:
It’s about Russia.
Multiple sessions creates an implicit spaced repetition. There’s also just less to remember for each session.
Talking about books is a creative activity in and of itself. Like writing, it helps you integrate what you read with your existing knowledge. Indeed, this is the reason why we are doing the book club in the first place.
Multiple sessions means more book club.
It’s like that advice you hear when you're learning a language or the piano or whatever: It's much better to practice each day for 20 minutes than once a week for a 2-3 hour session. The spacing effect means you just literally learn the thing better.
Another benefit is that if someone brings up a useful insight that you hadn’t thought about, it will enhance the rest of your reading. Discovering it at the end of the book may feel too late now that you’ve finished and may never return to it.
Also re the social connection aspect: It’s great seeing people reliably once a week or fortnight rather than haphazardly every few months with indefinite postponements due to people being behind on the reading. You’ll not only form a better connection with the book but with the people reading it as well.
Book club is now one of my favourite times of the week.
What size should the book club be?
I guess size might matter. For some things anyway.
I’ve found the best group size to be 3-6. If someone held a Colt 1911 to my temple and forced me to choose a single number that all book clubs had to adhere to, I’d say 3-4. If they then cocked the pistol, I’d say 4.
It balances the need to hear different voices with not being too crowded so everyone has a chance to speak. It’s also easier to manage. Four beats three for the risk if someone drops out.
Big groups see dispersion of responsibility. It’s easier not to do the readings as you aren’t letting others down. (Remember, do the reading.)
Earlier on I thought adding more people would automatically bring more merriment. But you lose intimacy. It’s also just too hard for everyone to feel comfortable getting a word in. Some naturally speak more than others.
As the host, it's best to drive discussion as you don’t want everyone just sitting around quietly. But you want to encourage others to speak. Maybe kick off the session by asking someone else to say something. Instead of asking them vaguely what they thought, maybe ask them something concrete: Ask them to quickly summarize section X to set context.
Scheduling
Scheduling can be hard. Especially if people are from different countries. This is another reason to avoid big groups.
If you’re meeting once per week or fortnight, you can get away with shorter sessions. However, I still think somewhere between 1-2 hours works best. It depends on the book but you’ve probably chosen something with a bit of meat to it. It’s best to have the availability of two hours with the option of cutting it shorter. 45 minutes may be all you need at a given session.
Another reason to not have one meeting per book is that you may find in this case that there’s too much to talk about.
Book clubs can fall down by constantly postponing due to scheduling issues. At some point you’ll have to choose a date and go with it.
I’ve found it easiest to have a regular day with the flexibility of moving it.
If your meeting date changes you can easily shift the number of expected pages to be read by the next session. This helps reinforce the idea that everyone is regularly reading the book rather than last minute catch ups.
Misc.
Other things I've experimented with is having a shared notes system. It isn’t necessary but it might be nice to capture the power of the hive mind.
Alternatively a spreadsheet that simply tracks the different scenes or sections that you’ve covered so far can be helpful.
You can have an outline of the meeting session (e.g. summary, themes, character X, specific examples of theme Y) but sessions tend to work pretty well without constraints.
The difficulty of the books isn’t the same thing as the length. Although the former is partly a function of the latter.