The Book Club Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the Reading Group Experience

This informative and interesting book is a great guide to many different books that most book clubs will love, especially if they have eclectic tastes. It also includes an amusing feature that lists what books were popular in book clubs in various decades past. Many books are profiled very well, and some are books that have recently come back into print.

When I thumbed through this book, I discovered that many of the suggested titles were among my favorites. So I have been reading a number of books from Loevy's lists, some familiar and some unfamiliar, and I have grown to trust her suggestions. Although I belong to a book club, I am less interested in the recipes and some of the articles about book club etiquette, such as whether to have pets present at meetings or not. The entry on pros and cons of knitting during discussion brought chuckles from the knitters in my book club. They did agree that if a famous author were one of our guests, the knitting would stop!

The book club I belong to has been meeting for about a year. We've had great discussions, we've read some interesting books, some loved, others disliked, but all were perfect books for discussion. So far we've kept up the momentum and we've attracted new members. I've shared this with friends who also belong to book clubs. Some will report how their book club is going strong after a given number of years, while others may talk about their book club becoming static. As I listened I discovered the reason for vitality as opposed to lethargy has less to do with the club's selections and more to do with ways to keep the book club alive. Meals, snacks, camaraderie, and varied selections for reading all contributed to the better and happier book clubs. For this reason I grabbed THE BOOK CLUB COMPANION as soon as I saw it, hoping for interesting ideas for a book club. It's that and more. The book is divided into sections with suggestions for all types of literary selections. The first deals with the standard book club favorites, classics in literature, British selections, memoirs, noir classics, African American literature, and enjoyable non-fiction selections. Sandwiched in each section are recipes, suggestions for discussion, author interviews and anecdotes, and just about anything else a book club could want to make the time enjoyable and enlightening, everything a book club should be. Books like this can spice up an existing club or make the meeting of a new club an event to be anticipated. Of course you don't need to belong to a book club to enjoy this book. It has great suggestions for personal reading ranging from the best known works to lesser known books that escape notice. However, when it comes to the recipes, they look too good resist and the temptation to form a book group, just to try the recipes, may be too great to resist. Happy reading!

Finally! New ideas for start-up and established book groups - something beyond our usual read-the-book-and-talk-about-it approach. Loevy shares her unique perspective on life and literature, along with her boundless creative energy in this gem of a manual for groups willing to try something out of the ordinary. All the ingredients are here for successful book discussions, including the backbone elements of good discussable literature, tips for keeping the conversation lively, and suggested lists of great titles we haven't thought to try. Add to this some fabulous entertaining and decorating tips, fashion advice and recipes (yes there's chocolate), and you get a truly well-balanced, all-around gauranteed successful and dynamic good time book party. Not to mention hours upon hours of fantastic reading, sampling from list after list of great reads. You'll appreciate the author's breezy, funny approach, and having her brilliant ideas at your fingertips. It's a motivational manual, a creativity sparker and a joy to read. Thank you Diana Loevy!

I cannot imagine anyone involved in a Book Club not loving this book. It is concise, extremely informative, and beautifully written. It may well become a classic.