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My experience with a non-fiction book club was somewhere in-between the 'study group' and 'social club' extremes. We ran the club via a meetup group for about t
by sdenton4 6y ago
My experience with a non-fiction book club was somewhere in-between the 'study group' and 'social club' extremes. We ran the club via a meetup group for about three years, with a 'core' group of ~10 people (of which about half would show up each month). Each month would also bring a few random meetup people who we would see once and never again.
a) Many non-fiction books are effectively a 'very good essay' in the first couple chapters, followed by N*100 pages of lower-quality expansion on the initial topic. It's completely OK if most people in the meeting don't read the whole thing. It's also much easier to skip around in non-fiction books, since the chapters are often more modular.
b) We would have a rotating 'moderator' who generally read the whole book, usually before it got picked up by the group. The moderator generally picks a subset of 'good chapters' which people can read if they aren't going to get through the whole book. Usually intro + chapter 1 + two later chapters with the best points.
c) For non-fiction, outside experience is often just as valuable to the discussion as having read the book. Having a really relevant person involved int he discussion is fantastic.
d) We also had a some great experiences with inviting the author to the discussion group, for books written by people who live in the area. We would often get ~20 people to turn out for these ones, and the authors were very happy to come talk about the thing they care about to even our small group.
- twic 6y ago> Many non-fiction books are effectively a 'very good essay' in the first couple chapters, followed by N*100 pages of lower-quality expansion I wonder if an essay club, rather than a book club, would work. You pick something short enough that it's easy to read, but still with enough ideas in to talk about. You then have time to either dig into the text really deeply, or use it as a prompt for a largely unrelated but still interesting conversation, HN comments style.
- OkayPhysicist 6y agoI had a theology course at university like that. We got a list of 2-3 "suggested readings", of which any given student read 0-2. Then there was loosely structured time to discuss in small groups, then a more structured class discussion.
- sdenton4 6y agoYeah, maaaaaybe. My guess is you'd end up reading a lot of book chapters for the essay club. The problem I think is that the economics of writing books is much more author-friendly than writing longform articles. So by the time you put a shitpile of research into writing something /good/, you really should be writing a book. Even if the 'cream' of the content is about three chapters. And the rest of the deep dive is still worth it for many readers (and those who aren't reading the whole book for book club can still go back for the rest later, if they want to).
- akuchling 6y agoI've also been running a nonfiction book club that reads popular science for 7 years now. It's always been OK in our group to only have read part of it, or to have watched an author talk or PBS documentary version. Nonfiction books mostly can't be spoiled, and it's possible to talk about the author's thesis by having just listening to a talk. Also, some books just don't lead to much discussion because they don't have any overarching theme -- some are collections of anecdotes and short episodes that are often fun to read but don't provide much to talk about beyond "what did you learn that most surprised you?" or "which section was your favorite?"