Hello all
I've volunteered to co-ordinate the Mumsnet Book Club and have had a chat with Carrie about how we go about it.
We definitely want this to be a democratic selection process. I don't think anyone wants a book forced upon us. However a complete free-for-all will be a little unwieldy so I shall start by nominating 4 books for selection. (I am starting a separate thread for this shortly).
So the general process for the next couple of sessions will be as follows:
- I shall nominate a shortlist of books on a new thread. All will be linked somehow rather than a random selection.
- Anyone interested can post their preferred choice onto that thread by a closing date (eventually about a week but probably 3 or 4 days to start with).
- The book with the highest number of votes will be announced on a Friday morning - giving people enough time to get the book from the library, bookshop or online.
- Discussion to start probably from about Monday onwards on a new thread started by me. You can of course start reading sooner (it's not a race) but we won't start discussing until people have had a reasonable chance to get hold of the book.
- About 1 month to be spent on each book to allow time to actually read - and to reflect afterwards - before reading the next book.
If people are interested we can organise a weekly "online meeting" where interested people can actually chat real-time about the book. We can specify an approximate place in the book we'll be discussing up to (to prevent discussion ruining the anticipation of the slow readers). Other than that I suggest a free-for-all discussion any time is best. However one of the most important - and indeed only - rule is: NO PLOT SPOILERS!
The plan is that the selection process for subsequent books begins whilst we are still reading the previous book so we can choose and buy/borrow at leisure.
Hopefully in the future we'd like to organise some sort of sponsorship. This may result in a few free copies and/or a more coherent selection list. Newly published books will probably not feature particularly highly as they come out in hardback and for financial reasons we'll try to stick to books available in paperback.
If anyone has any ideas for future books, topics (e.g. books set in Asia, detective novels, works of a particular author) or any sponsorship ideas (including personal connections!) then please post here - or contact me direct using Contact Another Talker.
Happy Reading!