by guest blogger Leif Steenson, Mobile Outreach Librarian, HCPL
I’m a Mobile Outreach Librarian, a non-traditional job with Harris County Public Library in which I develop and host programs at county community centers that you can normally find at one of our library branches. When I first thought about what programs I wanted to run, book clubs were at the top of the list, yet I felt a lot of trepidation. Before this job, I had never hosted or even participated in a book club, and while I love reading, I am not “well-read” and knew I would have a hard time picking and advocating for books that I thought other people would like to read. Nevertheless, I started my first book club in early 2022 at a community center in Cypress. Three years later, that club is still going strong, alongside three others that I started in 2023, 2024, and 2025.
How have I managed to keep multiple book clubs alive and flourishing for this long? It is not easy. While I have improved tremendously as a book club organizer and leader over the years and am proud of my abilities. I continue to sometimes choose books that flop hard, or lead conversations that can feel stilted or unsatisfying. As with many things in life, stubborn perseverance remains my crux.
That said, I do have a lot of rules that I’ve stumbled into over the years that I think have helped. If you are interested in starting your own book club, I can’t promise that any of these will work for you, but you are more than welcome to steal them.
Know when to let a conversation veer off the text, and when to reel it back in.
My two goals for a book club are 1. Have an interesting conversation, and 2. Talk about the book. If goal number one is going strong, I don’t see a good reason to tamp it down until it greatly threatens the integrity of goal number two. This can be a hard balance to achieve, though I find that most people are willing to leave out parts of a book from the discussion if what we did manage to talk about held everyone's attention and felt meaningful.
Bring discussion questions, but don't be beholden to them
I think discussion questions are useful tools for getting the conversation started and for getting it back on track if it is hitting a lull or going off the rails. I don't like to think of them as a list of topics that need to be addressed because that can make the meeting feel like homework, and regardless, they are not needed if a conversation is flowing naturally and thoughtfully on its own. But it's nice to have them as reminders of topics in the book that are worth discussing, in case we forget.
Encourage everyone to talk without putting anyone on the spot
Some people are naturally shy and have a hard time speaking up in a group setting, especially when other voices dominate the discussion. Other people are content to listen and keep their thoughts to themselves or at least spend more time considering them before sharing. It's your job to read the quiet people in the group the best you can and figure out who will or won’t appreciate gentle encouragement to participate in the conversation.
Get to know your members' tastes, but be willing to challenge them.
One of the benefits of joining a book club is being forced to read and finish books that you might never choose to read otherwise. It's not something you should subject all your members to every month, but asking people to step outside of their comfort zone once in a while usually pays off during the discussion. Plus, it’s unavoidable once your book club grows and gains a wider variety of interests and temperaments, so you might as well lean into it and sometimes take a chance on books that you know won’t please everybody.
Talk as little as possible, but be prepared to carry the conversation.
I don't like to give the impression that, as the organizer of the meeting, I am also the authority on how the book should be interpreted and where our conversation should lead. I want every person to feel like their contribution is as important as anyone else’s, and that often requires taking a step back to make room.
That said, if you want everyone to be invested in examining the book thoroughly and raising the conversation above the superficial, I think you need to lead by example. To me, this means coming into every book club as prepared as I possibly can be. Besides reading the entire book itself, I will often read the Spark Notes or SuperSummary if it's available to review the plot and themes. I also read reviews of the book on Goodreads as well as those of professional critics. I come up with discussion questions on my own and try to find more that others have written. I seek out interviews with the author, look up what other books authors have written to see where our book fits in their body of work, etc. --all while trying to keep in mind what my initial feelings about the book were and holding onto that throughout the onslaught of supplementary material.
You don’t have to work as hard as I do to prepare for a book club (particularly if you aren’t getting paid to do it like me). But I believe strongly that you can only ask people to care about discussing a book as much as you are willing to prove that there are things worth talking about.
Make sure everyone’s voice gets heard.
Besides the intrinsic value of this rule, I specifically try to get everyone to talk in the meeting at least once. This might contradict rule three a bit, but I think it helps signal to everyone in the meeting that not only does every person’s opinion matter, but not everything needs to be a profound statement to be worth sharing. The conversation doesn’t have to be productive in any traditional sense, it just needs to be an entertaining and relaxing way to spend time with other people, and that’s usually easier to achieve when everyone participates at least a little bit.
Find some quotes to fall back on.
If you are struggling to talk about the book overall, it can be fun to pull out quotes from the book and discuss them separately with as much or as little relation to the rest of the book as you want. This is particularly helpful if no one really liked the book, since people might find it easier to engage with the content of a quote if they don’t feel obligated to connect it to a book they didn’t care for.
Give each book its due, even if it's bad.
No matter whether I like or dislike a work of art, I still try to thoughtfully consider what artists involved were trying to achieve with it, what it took to create it, and the ways that the work of art exists as an object outside of its initial intentions. When I view art through these lenses, I usually find that there is more to think and talk about than I might have assumed on my initial impression of it. This is particularly true if you do all of this in good faith, giving the artist the benefit of the doubt that their work is important to them and that they worked hard to make it good, even if the results are lacking.
If you are trying to fill an hour of a person’s day with an engaging conversation about a piece of art like a book, the worst thing you can do is decide that there isn’t an hour’s worth of conversation to be had about it. Therefore, I operate under the assumption that there IS an hour’s worth of discussion to be had from the book, and that I should engage with the work of art from a place of high respect and curiosity to get there. This might not always bear fruit, but at worst your book club will probably appreciate that you tried, and at best they might discover ways of thinking about a book that they might have otherwise been immune to.
Good Conversation > Good Analysis
A book club isn’t a classroom, and there are no grades. If everyone had a good time at the book club, then you have succeeded at its main purpose, which is to bring people together and make meaningful connections in our frenzy to survive this stressful world.
A Selection of My Book Club Selections
I thought I could wrap up by sharing a handful of the 87 books we’ve done since I started. Their reception ran the gamut from beloved to largely despised.
This is a hugely popular book, and maybe a boring shout-out for y’all bibliophiles, but I’ve found it to be a great first book/icebreaker when starting a new book club. It succeeds as both literary fiction and as a mystery/thriller, the two most popular genres in my experience, and it always leads to healthy debates about the morality of the choices made by various characters in the book. Those are the kinds of conversations that provide compelling evidence to skeptics that a book club can be uproarious and entertaining
This was wildly disliked by everyone in my book club. I personally enjoyed it a lot, but I would only recommend it to an audience that is okay with stories that are told out of order, that frequently change perspective, experiments a lot with form and structure, and has main characters that have a lot of unlikeable or even uninteresting qualities.
This was also very disliked, for many of the same reasons as the previous book. Yet it still led to a really robust discussion. The book brings up a lot of topics, people’s dependence on technology, fear of the unknown, how you would react in an emergency, and other things that the book club members found relatable and were fun to hypothesize about with friends, even if it wasn’t directly related to what happened in the book itself. Ultimately, the book’s hooky premise/subject matter saved the day
Beyond anything else, this book gave people permission to share their experiences with Covid and lockdown, topics that everyone related to and seemed eager to engage in, often to their own surprise. Thankfully, most people also enjoyed the book itself. It's also nice to find a title by a popular author like Jodi Picoult that is shorter than most of their more famous works while still being interesting, which is kind of the book club sweet spot to be honest.
Non-fiction can be tough to sell in my experience, so if you are going to try one for people who don’t read a lot of it, it helps to find one that tells a story in a novelistic way like Killers. That said, books with very heavy subject matter like this one can be challenging to talk about in a group, which was my experience here. It can also be very rewarding, so long as you are prepared to rise to the challenge and don’t mind feeling sad or uncomfortable even after a “successful” meeting.
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