IRL Book Club: Planning for 2020

My book club is great. We’ve found a nice mesh of patterns that work for our little group and all fully accept that it’s a social group more than an academic meetup. We all like to read, enjoy learning things, and talking about what we think about new ideas and the lovely things that bring book lovers together.

We also like Panera, and getting out of our houses to have real conversations after long days, and weeks, between meeting. It’s fun.

Instead of picking one book each month we all have to read, we’ve decided to make it more flexible by picking a theme or a prompt for each month of the year and going from there. We can each read whatever we want, as long as it fits into the theme. Less pressure, more book talk, it’s a win-win.

We met yesterday to figure out what we’re going to do for 2020 and came up with some excellent prompts. Here they are (the first one is what we’re doing first, but other than that it’s not necessarily in order):

There were a few other topics and themes we talked about that didn’t make it onto this image that could be used for the “Free Space” category:

• Books that pass the Bechdel test

• Nature writing

In discussing all of these options, we also shared a whole slew of book recommendations with each other. To be quite honest, this free for all book recommending is one of my favorite parts of our book club. By having a theme each month we each get to bring something different to the group, which leads us to talk about all sorts of books from each person. It’s great and I always have books to add to my list when I get back. Tonight was an especially good free association of book titles.

Here are the books that were mentioned in our conversation while we developed this list:

• Radical Forgiveness, by Colin Tipping

• Necessary Endings, by Dr. Henry Cloud

• Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner

• All the Little Live Things, by Wallace Stegner

• Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner

• High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

• The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

• Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren

• Educated, by Tara Westover

• Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver

• Britt-Marie Was Here, by Fredrick Backman

• A Man Called Ove, by Fredrick Backman

• My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, by Fredrick Backman

• Soul Mountain, by Gao Xingjian

• Smila’s Sense of Snow, by Peter Høeg

• How to Cook A Wolf, by M. F. K. Fisher

• Talking to Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell

• The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard

• Terry Tempest Williams

• Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

• How Should A Person Be, by Sheila Heti

• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

• Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson

• Middlemarch, by George Eliot

• Beloved, by Toni Morrison

• Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing

• Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett

• The Century Series, by Ken Follett

• Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard

• Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• The Secret Life of Water, by Masaru Emoto

Don’t you wish you’d been there?! I’m psyched to talk books more with these ladies. It’s so fun. I highly recommend you gather your best pals (or people you want to get to know better), find something you have in common, and use it as an excuse to get together once a month. It’s a treat and you deserve one.

Feel free to join in with us as we go through these prompts!

Happy Reading!