consider my arse here! lol
Okay.. my bookgroup has been running for over 10 years now. I love my bookgroup.
This is what we do:
Someone volunteers to host (we kinda take turns but not in any specific order... it's more a case of... "ooh I haven't hosted for a while"). The hostess provides wine and nibbles (at a recent bookgroup her husband cooked a lovely meal with a to-die-for pudding).
We all throw in suggestions for books to read and then either by dint of persuasion or shouting the loudest the book is chosen.
We try not to stick to the same genre for too long. One can only read so many traumatic childhood bravely struggling through and surviving books.
If we're ever stuck for something to read we might look at recommended books via Orange book prize, Booker prize etc, but we normally manage to find one. We're not so keen on reading what everyone else is reading (so no Richard and Judy's choice for us).
I love the women in my group. We hardly see each other in the day to day which is great because it means that we don't discuss school etc, in fact our children go to very different schools and some have finished University.
Our evening follows a pretty similar pattern. We arrive, open wine and start to nibble. Quick check on how everyone's lives are going. Start to put the world to rights then someone says "hey what about the book". So we discuss the book, what we loved, hated etc. All the time eating and drinking. When the book has been exhausted we resuming world righting until someone else says "hey what's the next book?".
We meet about once a month. We choose two books to read over the summer and/or Christmas. We read fiction, non-fiction, biographies, autobiographies, "trauma" novels, fun novels (eg Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day).
Some bookgroups like to have their choices set out for the year. Too control freaky for us. We're a bit more organic. The aim of the bookgroup is to have fun and read things that we wouldn't normally pick up in the bookshop/library. Works really well. If the chosen book is a short one we'll often have a second one in there as well.
Over the summer we're reading Sky Burial by Xiran (brilliant) and Bill Bryson's Shakespeare.
Your bookgroup is what you make it. You set the "rules" and see what works best for the people that you have in it.
We have 9 in our group. We used to have 10. 1 member died of breast cancer, another woman came along a year later and then another left because her life became to busy. We're a tight group now and I don't think that it would be easy for anyone to join us as we've been through loss, divorce, illness, career changes, new men etc. Love my group.
I think that a bookgroup might become unmanageable with more than 10 people. 8-10 seems a good number.
hth