Choosing Books for a Book Club

Since I call myself the Book Whisperer and choose books for my long-standing book club and alternate choosing in another small book club, I constantly look for books that will be engage the members. In the large book club, I develop a theme and then find books to fit the theme. Or I find a particular book that I think the book club will enjoy and build a theme around it, choosing other books to fit.

Often, developing the theme is fairly easy. For example, I read The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman and felt the large book club would like it. Now, to build a theme around the book. It centers on the loss of a child or the longing for a child, so I began looking for other books that would fit into the theme. We read three books for each theme, so I was one-third of the way toward my goal.

Amazon’s “Customers who bought this item also bought” link is occasionally helpful in choosing other books. However, that ploy is not always the best one since some of the books in that link will differ markedly from the ones I am choosing.

My searches for novels about longing for a child, or loss of a child took me to The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey and Orphan Train by Christine Baker Kline. Those two books completed the quest for the three books.

Recently, Off the Shelf, www.offtheshelf.com, provided me with a number of themes I will be researching in the coming months. For example, author Kate Morton wrote an article for Off the Shelf about novels that explore past and present. In 2009, I had selected The House at Riverton by Kate Morton for the book club. I continued to follow her subsequent novels and enjoyed them, so I felt her selections would be not only interesting, but also intriguing.

Morton suggested The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin, In Falling Snow by Mary-Rose MacColl, A Dark-Adapted Eye by Ruth Rendell, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, and The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. I have read Ruth Rendell, but not A Dark-Adapted Eye. Rebecca is, of course, a long-time favorite. At any rate, all of the books Morton names would interest the members of the book club, so they have gone into a list.

The next Off the Shelf article to catch my attention was “From Narnia to Castle Leoch 6 Magical Books That Transcend Time.” The books included in that article are The Green Darkness by Anya Seton, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, and Time and Again by Jack Finney.

Alas, I chose a time travel theme some time ago only to find that one of the founding members of the book club intensely dislikes time travel books. The Time Traveler’s Wife and Time and Again were among the books for that theme along with To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. I will explore these books on my own since I have already read three of them including Outlander.

One can choose a theme and then find books to fit the theme. Alternatively, find a book that will engage the book club members and then locate other books to fit the theme. Either method will work to keep members reading, discussing, and enjoying literature of all types.