Book Club Experience

The Lakeville Library Book Club is the longest running book club in the St. Joseph County Public Library system. In November of 2016 the club celebrated its 10th anniversary with a special trip to Stacks, a library themed restaurant in Valparaiso. In the ten years they’ve been together, the LLBC has read more than 130 books. In the beginning they chose two books per month – one fiction and one nonfiction – but soon decided that that was just too much work. The club meets in the Lakeville Branch meeting room normally on the second Thursday of the month.

The group is entirely female. That has not always been the case. There have been a few members over the years that were men. The meeting is advertised in the library’s calendar of events so from time to time a man will show up but as far as anyone in the group can remember, I was the first man to be at the book club in several years.

There is a core group of eight women though the group can get as big as 20. The women prefer the smaller group size because it allows for better conversation. There are also numerous Lakeville Branch patrons who do not attend but like to read the book the book club is reading. (The library has a display up that showcases both the current and previous book club selections.) There is not a defined leader of the group. There is one current Lakeville Branch staff member who is involved and two former Lakeville Branch staff member. The current member makes sure everyone gets their copy of the book for the month and sends out reminders about the meeting but she does not lead. In fact, there really isn’t a leader of the book club. The youngest woman in the group is in her mid 40s and the oldest is in her late 80s. Additionally, some of these women have known each other for decades. The majority of the women have been in the group since the very beginning. Only one of the members when I was there joined the group within the last five years. She is still jokingly called “the new girl” though she’s known most of the members for a long time.

What strikes an outside observer right away is that the book club is really a book club/social club. I arrived 15 minutes early and there were already four members in the room deep into conversation. Every time a new member arrived (12 women came in all) they were greeted with hugs. Each woman brought some sort of snack or desert though most of it goes uneaten. It’s not that they don’t like the food – everyone raved about Rosemary’s pie or Kathy’s cheese dip – but the women were too busy talking and laughing to eat. And the laughing! I don’t know if I’ve ever heard so much laughing! The women had a wonderful time and it was absolutely infectious. I would dare anyone to sit in a LLBC meeting and not have a good time.

The first half hour of the meeting was spent socializing. Lakeville is a very small town but some of the women in the group no longer actually live in the city. One member drives roughly 40 minutes to attend the club. This is the only chance many of them to see each other every month. One woman, Sue, hadn’t been in a long time and everyone made a big fuss over seeing her again. Another woman, Sharon, had recently lost her mother and everyone was very happy to see her out and about again. They talk about everything under the sun and there were multiple phones being passed around showing off photos of children, grandchildren, and pets. After a lull in the conversation, one of the members – Kay, the oldest member of the group – picked up her copy of The Dry and said, “Well…what did everyone think?” Before anyone had a chance to answer, Kay emphatically announced, “I loved it.”

If the first thing an observer notices is how social the group is than the second thing is that the women in the group have no problem telling each other their opinion. There did not appear to be anyone holding back. It quickly became clear that (1) the group rarely reads a book like The Dry, which is a very dark murder-mystery and (2) not everyone in the group is happy about that. Kay, for example, spoke quite a bit about how it was nice to read something that was more than, what she called, “fluffy nonsense.” The group reads a lot of historical fiction and most of it is romantic. They do read the occasional mystery but it is always much lighter. For example, in December they read The Bark Before Christmas. They used to do a lot of classics but they haven’t done one in a very long time. Opinion of The Dry was mostly positive. There were some who loved it. One woman, Sherry, said that she was surprised at how much she enjoyed the book because she typically does not like books like The Dry. But she added that she doesn’t want to read another like it for a while because it kept her up at night. Another woman, Sheri (there were three women named Sherry in the group and all three Sherrys were spelled differently!), was quite comfortable telling the group that she did not finish reading it because it was vulgar and it offended her as a Christian. (No one responded to this. One woman informed me later that Sheri says that about most of the books they pick. They also pointed out that at least she tries to read the book every month.) I was asked my opinion and I told the group that I really enjoyed it but most of the discussion about the book really focused on whether or not the group should read more titles like The Dry going forward. In the end it was kind of decided that they should but maybe not for a few months.

The last 1/3rd of the meeting was spent debating what their next book should be. Nearly everyone had a suggestion. Some suggestions were made with explanations and others were not. The current library staff member (who was not actually working during the meeting) wrote down all of the titles. There were approximately 25. Most were newer titles. A few were from authors that the group had previously read. A woman named Decky (yes, Decky with a “D”) suggested that the group spend all of 2017 reading classics and thought that they should start with Emma. Kathy, the former staff member, thought they should read Hillbilly Elegy. There were numerous romantic historical fiction or light mystery suggestions. One woman whose name I did not catch suggested the group read several of the James Patterson’s Book Shots. They also flipped through the pages of Book Page and Booklist to get ideas. It was fun to watch the process of figuring out what the next book would be. In the end they went with The Runaway Midwife by Patricia Harmon. Hillbilly Elegy was a close second and several of the women announced that they were going to read it anyway and maybe they could talk about it at the next meeting as well. I was told that this was not abnormal. It almost seemed like there was the book club and then a series of splinter book clubs within the book club!

The meeting started at 6:00 and by the time they had made their pick for next month it was past 7:30. The women started to clean up but it was more social time than anything else. During this social time, though, the group separated into smaller groups. The women got up and moved around. There were several one-on-one conversations as well as a couple larger group conversations. The women didn’t leave until 8:00 when the library closed and even then several of them stuck around in the parking lot.