"Share the Load!"

As promised, here are some of the benefits of opening the book club to other discussion leaders. Some of these benefits were expected, but many of them were not. Here is a list with some explanation:

No Book Club Leader Is an Island

In my last post in this series I shared the initial e-mail I sent out to potential book club members outlining a "book enthusiasts club." From the beginning I said that I would handle administration, but I also said that I would choose the readings. This was fine at first because 1) I had a backlog of readings already chosen for this purpose, and 2) I was always ready to foist my reading recommendations on others. (I'm known in the book club as "the raver.") But I quickly encountered the enemy that always dogs the steps of the overambitious: burnout.

Book Club Boundaries

As mentioned in my last post, the book-enthusiasts group I started in college served as the basis of the reading group I started at work. This is the e-mail I sent out when I first proposed the group:

A Low-Commitment Book Club

In college some friends and I had the idea for a new kind of book club. But before I get into that, the backstory.

I wrote earlier about book clubs, that more people say they want to be in a book club than actually want to be in a book club. I discovered this truth in college. Of course I knew there were crazy people out there who didn't like books; I could understand that they didn't want to be in a book club. But why would people who claim to like books sit out of a book club?