Thursday, May 3, 2007

Care and feeding of book discussion groups

Several people have posted their notes about Nancy Pearl's Thursday morning session so I'm not sure I'll post my notes where others did a very thorough job. I will say this though - Nancy would do a huge favor to recipients of the "Let's Talk About It"/Nextbook grants - http://nextbook.org/ala/index.html by becoming part of the training offered. We had this exciting series at our library last fall and more specifically the Heart's Desire theme. I went for a one day training workshop that gave a lovely overview of the series and some fabulous marketing advice, but this kind of nitty gritty about how to run a book discussion was somewhat absent. I guess I'm just very relieved to hear what we experienced, in terms of one person often dominating the discussion, and also the whole dichotomy discussion at the outset of each evening ("I loved it .../ I hated it ...") seems to happen to everyone.

I also appreciated her encouraging us not to take a lack of success personally - after our successful series last fall, I'm very interested in starting up another book series, but nervous that it might not fly. We've discussed somehow teaming up with a public library in our area which would be great, where public libraries have much more experience in this area I think.
Any takers??

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