After last fall’s wonderful open forum on book clubs and after the craziness of the holidays, we are now ready to begin the Country Bookshelf Book Club we promised. Based on feedback from you, our customers, we’ll have a few ground rules and basic expectations and a few basic criteria for book selection. If you have further suggestions, please email us at countrybookshelf@gmail.com.

We meet upstairs at the Country Bookshelf on the 4th Tuesday of each month from 7pm to about 8:30pm. So far, all discussions have been led by Country Bookshelf staff members, but we’d love to have members of the public lead discussions and prepare some research. Let us know if you are interested in this.

Our attendees have including men and women of all ages. We’d love to even see teens show up, but we don’t promise to censor our discussion.

Best of all, this is one club you don’t have to commit to. Come when it suits your schedule or interest. We’ve been fortunate to see new faces at almost every meeting.

Expectations/Goals

1. The first rule of book club is ” Don’t talk about book club.”

1. All right, seriously now, the main expectation is that during book club meetings we WILL talk about the book.

2. This does not mean that you are unwelcome if you haven’t read the book. If you haven’t read the book, we’d still love to have your presence, and your questions might be exceptionally valuable, but don’t expect us to refrain from discussing the end of the book.

3. The Country Bookshelf will provide the location and staff members or other volunteers to lead discussion, but as with any such endeavor, individual participants will gain more from the event through participating: active listening, commenting, posing theories, suggesting ideas, asking questions, answering questions. While having read the book and/or even done some basic research on the book or author will be helpful, these are not required. The discussion leader will have some background information to share and some questions to begin the discussion.

4. We hope to stay focused on the ideas, characters, style and choices of the novel as opposed to whether we liked or disliked the book.