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" The trouble with my book club is that we don&amp;#039;t do a good job of picking our books. At the beginning of each year, we all bring suggestions and then informally choose which ones sound interesting. Isn&amp;#039;t there a more effective way? Ellen responds: Absolutely. But the first order of business for any book club is not picking the books but clarifying its goals. Did your group organize around reading or around people who happen to like each other and also like to read? If your answer is the latter, imposing structure is bound to be more difficult because your get-togethers are inspired as much by social reasons as by intellectual or literary ones. Still, either way, you can all get more bang for your book if you agree out loud on the shared purpose. Then impose one of the cardinal rules from The Reading Group Book, by David Laskin and Holly Hughes: Choose books that at least one member has already read and can vouch for. None of this: &amp;quot;I heard Such-and-Such was pretty good...&amp;quot; I belong to two book groups, both partly for friendship. In the dual-gender one, known as the Bloomsbury Group, I love the chance to talk about authors and books I either read long ago or am meeting for the first time. Thanks to this group, I&amp;#039;ve read Nobel Prize winners Knut Hamsun and Rabindranath Tagore. The members of our group joke about some of our erudite picks, but we&amp;#039;re all on the same page about reading books of enduring importance. If your club&amp;#039;s goal is more diffuse, try suggesting that you experiment with a yearly theme to gain more focus. This has helped bring focus to my women-only book club. You could choose books by genre (for example, biographies or historical novels), geography (South America, South Africa, etc.), subject matter (race, marriage, raising teenagers and so on). Narrowing the range could bring more discussion-worthy books to the fore. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/a21122/book-club-selections-jul04/>