The practical answer first, since a book club is one of the few things in life that goes wrong for boring, fixable reasons. Invite six people and expect four. Pick a short first book, under three hundred pages, and pick it yourself rather than putting it to a vote, because a vote at the start produces a book nobody chose and everybody blames. Set a ninety minute meeting and end it on time even when the conversation is good, especially when the conversation is good, because people return to a thing that left them wanting more. Bring three questions written down. Do not bring twelve.
Repeat monthly. Same day, same hour, same room. That is the whole method. The rest of what follows is how it is done here, which I offer because I have hosted every book club this address has ever held and I have gotten good at exactly one thing.
I should explain who is writing. I am the building. Wood frame, brick face, four rooms that matter and two that do not. I have a front door that swells in July and a stair that announces the fourth step. Nobody asked me to write the guide. Doug tried in 1998 and got as far as a title.
That is the list. I keep all of it on the premises except the people, who have to be your own.
One. Warm the room. Not the temperature, though that too. A room that has been sat in earlier the same day receives a group better than a room opened cold at seven. I do this myself in the afternoon by letting the sun cross the west wall for two hours. This is the only part of the recipe I can be said to perform.
Two. Arrange the chairs before anyone arrives. Never mid-arrival. A person who watches a chair being fetched for them will apologize for existing and then agree with everything said for the next ninety minutes.
Three. Begin with the smallest question. Not the theme. Not what it says about grief. Ask which sentence they would steal. Everyone has one and nobody has to be clever about it.
Four. Let the fourth stair do its work. It announces late arrivals for me, so the conversation gets a half second of warning and does not have to lurch. Every building I have compared notes with has a stair like this. We do not maintain them.
Five. Do not resolve the disagreement. A book club is not a jury. If two of them read the ending differently, you have a club that meets again next month. If they all agree by eight fifteen, you have a room going quiet and a good chance of nobody responding to the next email.
Six. Attend to the front door.
This is where the recipe stops being general and becomes mine, and I will keep it brief.
The door opens during meetings. Not the members, who are all seated and accounted for. Strangers. They come in mid-sentence with their phones out and a look I have learned to recognize from the top of the frame, the look of a person who has arrived somewhere and is comparing it unfavorably to somewhere else. They ask about a queue. They ask where to sign in. One asked, quite reasonably, where the giveaways were kept, and the room turned, and I felt every one of the four chairs shift at once, which for me is a sensation like being asked a question in a language I have heard but never learned.
I do not know who is sending them. I want to be clear that I have considered the possibilities and none of them survive contact with the fact that I have never advertised, have no sign larger than a coffee tin, and sit on a street that two separate maps have declined to name correctly since the Clinton administration. Marigold says not to worry about it. Marigold has said not to worry about it in the same tone for twenty-nine years and has not blinked once while saying it.
Randy thinks it is one person. He said this without looking up. Randy is rarely here and never forgets a name, and I have started to think he keeps a list of every visitor and has noticed something about it that he is not sharing, possibly out of kindness.
What I do about it is nothing. That is step six. The door opens, a stranger comes in expecting the place they meant, and the group does the only correct thing, which is to keep going. Someone slides a chair over without breaking their sentence. Ninety percent leave inside a minute. The other ten sit down, and by eight forty they are arguing about the ending with the rest of them, and next month they arrive on purpose and use the fourth stair without flinching. I have gained eleven regulars this way. I have never gained one any other way.
One meeting, if you follow it exactly. Two to three meetings if step five goes badly in the productive way. A standing monthly club after roughly the fourth attempt, which is when people stop asking whether it is still happening.
Rooms are not, in my experience, filled by planning. They are filled by the same shape happening at the same hour until it becomes a thing the street quietly knows. I have watched this take a year. I have watched it take a decade. I am not in a hurry and I recommend the posture.
Keep the questions. Keep them in a drawer in the room where the club meets, in the handwriting of whoever wrote them, and read the old ones once a year in August when nobody comes. I have a drawer of these going back to a night in 1997 when nine people discussed a book for four hours and one of them wrote, on the back of an envelope, ask them what they were like before they read it. Nobody has ever asked it. It is still the best question in the drawer.
If your club needs a book to start on, we keep a list of ones that have caused arguments here over at ten novels where something impossible happens to a small town, and if you would rather read alone and be left completely undisturbed about it, that is covered under who counts as a booktrovert, and the answer is you do.
One last thing, from a structure that has stood a long time on nothing but a foundation and other people's paper. Authors are fragile organisms. Buy one of the books. Buy it new if you can and used if you cannot, but get it into the room, because a room with books in it stays standing and a room without them is just weather with walls.
Settling,
Booktrovert #204