How to run a book club that survives its third book

How many people a book club can carry

The workable size is four to six. That is not taste, it is airtime: in an evening of two hours, six people get a quarter of an hour each if everyone speaks equally. At ten it becomes a panel with an audience, and the audience stops coming.

The lower bound bites harder than most people expect. With three, the meeting is cancelled the moment one person drops out, because two people is not a meeting, it is coffee. Starting with four builds in one absence.

The common mistake is the polite one: inviting one more person because it would be awkward not to. Two such invitations later, nobody is talking about the book any more, only about calendars.

A book club does not grow into its size. It grows out of it.

How often, and why monthly is nearly always the answer

A month is long enough for an average book alongside a full-time job, and short enough that you still remember the opening when you reach the end. Fortnightly sounds ambitious and is the most reliable way to end a book club inside six months.

Three things matter more about the rhythm than its length:

• The date is fixed before the book is. A club that looks for the next date after every meeting eventually stops looking.
• Always the same weekday. The second Tuesday of the month remembers itself; a moving date needs somebody to chase it.
• A book that is obviously too long gets two meetings rather than one rushed one. That is more honest than letting half the group turn up unfinished.

The date is not the point, it is the tool. It is a deadline, and the deadline is the reason a book in a book club actually gets finished.

Who picks the next book

This is where it is decided whether the club belongs to one person or to a group. There are three usual arrangements, and they differ less in what gets read than in who ends up resenting it.

The three arrangements, and what each one costs:

• Take turns. Everyone gets a turn and picks without having to justify it. The cost: sooner or later the group reads something only one person wanted. That is the point, not a fault.
• Vote on a shortlist. Reliably produces the middle, because the winner is the book nobody objects to rather than the one anybody is keen on.
• One person always picks. Works for surprisingly long, and ends with everybody else feeling like a guest rather than a member.

Taking turns is the arrangement people regret least. What matters is the unspoken half of it: whoever has the turn picks, and the others read it without relitigating the choice at the meeting. A book club that talks about the pick is not talking about the book.

Whoever picks does not have to justify it. That is the whole bargain.

The ground rules you set once and never revisit

The following look fussy for as long as they are settled. Unsettled, they are the reasons book clubs quietly dissolve, almost always without anyone naming what is actually going on.

Four agreements cover most groups:

• What happens when somebody has not finished. The only answer that holds: they come anyway and say so at the start. Anyone who stays away unfinished stays away the next time too.
• Whether the ending gets discussed. At a meeting held after everyone has read it, the answer is yes, and it has to have been said beforehand.
• Who runs the conversation. Not a role with a title, just whoever asks the first question and moves things on after an hour.
• Whether people write to each other between meetings. Any group that does needs a rule about how far that is allowed to go.

That last one is the only one goodwill cannot solve. To say anything while reading, you have to know where everyone else is, and nobody tracks that for five people at once. It is why most groups go silent between meetings: not from indifference, but from caution.

At Wir Buchverliebten the reading position handles it. A note belongs to the chapter it was written at, and becomes visible to the others only once they reach that chapter themselves. So anyone can write the moment something strikes them, without working out who is how far along, and the weeks between two meetings belong to the club again instead of being a gap.

How book clubs actually end

Hardly any of them end in a decision. There is no meeting at which stopping is agreed. There is a date that gets moved, then a second one, and after that nobody asks.

The three most common endings look harmless from inside:

• The book that was too long. Half the group does not finish, the meeting is postponed, and the postponement is the end.
• The quiet majority. Two people talk, four listen. Anyone who has said nothing three times does not come a fourth.
• Calendar drift. The weekday moves once for a good reason and is never the same again.

All three are cheap to fix early: a second meeting for a thick book, a question aimed deliberately at the quiet ones, a weekday that holds even when it suits somebody badly once. What cannot be fixed is the state where everyone can tell it is over and nobody says so.

Questions that get a conversation about a book started

A book club does not die of an argument. It dies of the second postponement.

A checklist for before the first meeting

If you have read this far, every decision is on the table. This card collects them so you can tick them off once and then forget about them. It is meant to be printed, and you are welcome to pass it on.