Book Club Experience

As luck would have it, a friend of mine-- having recently moved home after being away for several years-- had expressed interest in starting a book club prior to this assignment, and she asked me if I would help her moderate the group.  She assembled a Facebook group and invited around 25 of our mutual friends and acquaintances to join, then started a thread to gauge interest and there was a generally positive response. We determined a time and a place to meet, and left the group open in order to allow any interested parties to extend invites to friends. As the conversation went on, Kazuo Ishiguro's name came up in discussion and we eventually settled on Never Let Me Go for our first book club book. 

We met at a New Orleans-themed cafe in the downtown area of our city, which might not have been the best idea because there was live music and initially it was hard to talk to each other. Out of all of the people we had invited, only 4 of us were able to actually attend the meeting; of the 4 of us that showed up, only 2 of us had actually finished the book.  However, the other 2 people there had read enough of the book to hold a discussion, and we enjoyed a few cocktails and talked for roughly 2 hours. We didn't use any kind of study guides, but during the course of reading the books it became apparent that there was plenty to talk about.  Topics of conversation mostly centered on the behavior of the characters—and especially why one of the characters, Ruth, acted so horribly towards the other 2 main characters, Tommy and Kathy, and tried to keep them apart when they were obviously meant to be together.  The book proved to be divisive and 2 of us (myself included) rated the book at 2 of 5 stars, while the other 2 people rated it at 4 of 5 stars. Generally the people who rated the book poorly did so because they felt that none of the characters in the book were very likable—and that some of them were downright stupid—while the people who did like the book admitted that they typically enjoyed novels that were "sort of tragic."

Despite the not-so-stellar turnout, everyone enjoyed the meeting and we all agreed to meet again.  Several people had mentioned—via Facebook—that even though they missed the first meeting, they would still be interested in attending book club on future dates.  We also decided that we would take a poll of everyone who finished the book—even if they didn’t make the meeting—in order to keep track of our overall response to the books that we read; Never Let Me Go ended up with an overall rating of 3 after everything was said and done—which made sense based on our initial group’s ratings.  We held a discussion about what to read next, and we realized that there was quite a bit of interest from members in science fiction in general—and especially in sci-fi that would be considered “dystopian.”  One of the group members suggested the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which most of the members had never heard of before.  The overall consensus was that most of us wanted to get outside our comfort zones when it comes to the book club, so we elected to go for it. The book is considered to be one of the first dystopian science fiction novels, written in 1921, and is said to have been greatly influential upon George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.  I was initially concerned that it would be a hard book to find, but no one’s had any problems finding it so far, and it looks like book club is on track for next month.