World Book Day is upon us on March 7th. Here’s how you can set up your own book club at home for adults and families.
Getting most adults to a book club will be challenging, but a great way to bring family members or friends together is to set up a mini version at home. Invite your chosen few and put a new spin on the regular question and discussion format.
Read different books
This may seem like a counterintuitive move – but a new spin on book club is to have a common author but anyone can read any book they’d like. Not only does this engage people who don’t want to read the book which has been selected for them, but it changes the usual format of a book club from focusing on plot and characters towards the narrative techniques of the author and how they’ve developed across several books.
Adaptations club
Is “the book was better” always the first thing to leave your lips after watching a book to film adaptation? An adaptation book club allows you to explore just that. This type of book club is for the detail orientated debaters; it will take you onto subjects of written and visual techniques, genre, lore, and fan-base knowledge.
Go audio
If your book club members are a group of busy people who don’t have much time to read, then this could be the book club opportunity for you! Your audiobook allows you to listen on the go, better yet, it will usually tell you how many hours the story takes so you can effectively schedule your next meeting. Not only can you discuss the text in an audiobook club, but you can also ponder the impact of the narrator on the story and if it changed your perception of the book.
Inviting children to start reading for pleasure and separating it from their reading at school is important to raise a new generation of bookworms. Reassuring them that they don’t always have to understand parts of the stories or pick them apart and analyse them like they do in class will help them to trust their own instincts, interests, and passions when reading.
Where to start
Let them select a book which is within their reading abilities – a good website for this is BookTrust, its Bookfinder section separates books into age groups all the way up to 12+ and gives you a range of book themes to help you filter your options. After giving your child time to read set some time aside and create a cosy environment to chat about their book. Answers could be via a creative medium such as drawing pictures.
Questions
- Why did you choose this book?
- If the main character in the story went to your school, would you want to be their friend?
- What does the place in the book look like in your imagination? Do you want to go there?
- Who was your favourite character and why?
- What was the most interesting part of the book?
- Did the book end the way you thought it would and would you have ended it differently?
- If you could change one thing in the book, what would it be?
Worldbookday.com