In July of last year, I joined Bookstagram, encouraged to do so by my wonderful best friend Sarah (@readersramblings), who is a huge advocate for the online community. In one of our many conversations about books, we both mentioned how we’d love to be part of a book club together, but the geographical distance between us made it pretty much impossible. Then Sarah came up with a great idea: why don’t we join an online one? And then, even better, why don’t we form our own?
So, Talk Wordy To Us was born. An online book club that reads one book a month, holding weekly discussions to discuss the chapters we’ve read. We threw the idea out on Bookstagram and the feedback we got blew us away. Within days, the book club was up and running, with over 60 people keen to get involved. We want the group to be as collaborative as possible, and so encourage all group members to suggest what they’d like to read. To make this process easier, we ask everyone to suggest a handful of genres of books they’d be interested to read. We pick the four most popular, creating an Instagram poll which allows us to find the most popular suggestion. Then, with this genre in mind, we ask for suggestions of books that would fit. Again, we choose the most popular four suggestions and create another poll to find the winning book. And that’s it! The book is chosen. The final step in the process is to divide the book into four parts, one for each week of the month (it gets a little tricky when it’s a five-weekend month, but we always work it out). Why join a book club? There are many books out there that are much better when reading collaboratively. They throw up questions that you need others to answer, or ones that you need to discuss. Sometimes another person’s perspective on a book totally changes the way you read it and enhances your experience. Another great thing I’ve found the book club does is push me out of my book-comfort zone, challenging me to read books I otherwise wouldn’t have picked up. Our second book of the month was Lore, a high-fantasy Greek mythology book. I had never read anything of the sort before and was pleasantly surprised when I enjoyed it. What do people think? I asked Sarah how she finds the experience of co-running a book club. “Where to start? There are many reasons why I love book clubs and Talk Wordy To Us in particular. The variety of books being one of them. So far, we have read books I would have never considered or looked twice at. As an example - our first ever book was The Guest List… a thriller. Even Amy will tell you I would have never touched a thriller! Secondly - the friendships we have watched being made, buddy reads and watching just how much everyone has grown. Knowing I’m part of such a buzzing community makes it worthwhile. Finally, who wouldn’t want to co-run a book club with their best friend? I love running this with Amy. It’s something special to share together and I am so proud of us - I love our book club and I can’t wait to continue to watch it grow and see who else joins us along the way.” Hopefully we’ve convinced you that book clubs are worth joining. It doesn’t have to be ours of course, but if you’re interested in joining Talk Wordy To Us then we would be over the moon to have you! Follow us on Instagram: @talkwordytous and send us a DM to get involved!
Amy
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