I Love Book Club!

I have a book club. It started a few years ago when a good friend and I had great discussions about books we've read or wanted to read but hadn't found a book club we wanted to join. Book clubs are so much pressure: you have to read the book (even if it's one you're way not interested in), read it on time, and come up with clever and insightful comments about what you read. TOO MUCH PRESSURE! So, we decided to start our own and call it The Casual Book Club. A few of my coworkers joined, then another friend, and her friend, and we've been meeting ever since.

Here are our "casual" rules:
1. We only read classics
2. These classics should have a happy ending (life is hard enough)
3. You can opt out of reading if you'd like, and you can still come to the meeting
4. You don't have to say ANYTHING about the book
5. We vote on the books we are going to read so we generally read only things that are interesting to us

Here's how we select what we read:
Everyone submits their suggestions and I compile them on to one master list. When we're all together, everyone gets a list and rates each book on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being not interested in reading and 5 being when can I start reading?). We add up all the points and the five books with the highest numbers are the next five that we read. This has worked really well for us so far - we haven't read many books that we didn't like.

We have read some great books. Here is the list:
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
East Wind West Wind, Pearl Buck
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
Middlemarch, George Eliot

So far our favorite, hands down, is The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. We read The Woman in White first and loved it so much that we decided to read The Moonstone too - and loved it even more!
Our least favorite ( I really mean the one we HATED!!!) was The Picture of Dorian Gray...waste of time!!! HATE HATE HATED that book.
In my next post I will review the one I just finished reading, Middlemarch. Stay tuned!