Warning: Skipping the discussion guide wrecked our book club meeting last week

I'm the one who usually runs our monthly book club meetings, and last week I found out the hard way that the official discussion guide actually matters. We were reading "The House in the Cerulean Sea" for about three weeks, and I thought I knew the book well enough to wing the conversation. After 45 minutes of people just saying "I liked it" or "the characters were nice," the whole thing went dead quiet. Two members actually left early because they said it felt like we weren't getting anywhere. One lady finally pulled out her library's printed guide and pointed to a question about the author's take on found family that nobody had even considered. Now I always spend 20 minutes scanning the discussion guide before each meeting to find 3 or 4 good conversation starters. Has anyone else found that a prepared list of questions stops the awkward silences?

3 comments

3 Comments

gray614d ago

Winged a Lord of the Rings meeting once. Total disaster, never again.

elliot4514d ago

Did you at least get a free meal out of it before everything went sideways? Seems like those meetings are always a gamble between getting something done or just watching people argue about whether Frodo should have taken the eagles. I bet someone brought up the eagles within the first five minutes.

vera_murphy11d ago

You said "winged a Lord of the Rings meeting once" but I think you meant "winged it" right? Anyway, yeah the eagles thing is unavoidable. Someone always brings it up, usually before anyone even reads the agenda. I sat through one where a guy spent ten minutes explaining why the eagles couldn't take the ring because of Sauron's surveillance or something. The debate went on so long we never even got to the actual topic of the meeting, which was about scheduling next month's deadlines. Free meal? We got soggy sandwiches and a bag of chips that had been sitting out for hours. Not worth the headache.