A book club guideauthor, context and questions for every meeting

Method

1. 1

   Have your assistant lay out the year

   Connect your assistant to know.sh once, following the support page. Then give it the reading list and ask it to make a shelf called Alder Street Readers with a document, The 2027 list: one finding per book, titled with the month, the title and the author, noting the length and the year it was published, and, from catalogue details you paste in, whether the library has large-print, audiobook and e-book copies.

   Ask it, too, to make an empty document for each book, titled the same way: March — The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton, 1920). Ten documents, ready to fill. For a book first published in the US before 1931, it can note that the text is in the public domain there and link a free edition such as Project Gutenberg’s.

2. 2

   Ask for the research a month ahead

   A month before each meeting, ask your assistant to research the book on the web and file what it finds in that book’s document: a finding on the author’s life as it bears on the book, one on when and why it was written, one on the world it describes, and one on how it was received, then and since. Every finding lists its sources. Reviews are credited by critic, publication and date, and quoted only in a sentence or less.

   Tell it plainly what to leave alone: the publisher’s reading-group guide is not to be copied or paraphrased; a link to it is enough. This needs an assistant with web search. Claude and ChatGPT have it; many local set-ups do not.

3. 3

   Have it draft questions by section

   Tell your assistant how the club reads the book: in one go, or in two meetings. Then ask for five or six open questions per section, each finding titled with the chapters it covers, “Questions: Book Two, chapters 28–32”. A good question points to a scene and asks what the reader made of it; it does not have one right answer, and it does not test whether anyone finished.

   For a recent book the assistant may know only reviews and summaries, not the text. It must say so, and you must check every question against the pages.

4. 4

   Check the research in the editor

   Now read the guide as a sceptic. Press Edit on each finding and open every source. Delete any claim you cannot trace, and any review you cannot find at the address given. A quotation that runs past a sentence gets cut down or turned into your own summary. Where sources disagree about a date or an anecdote, change the finding’s type to Question and say so; the room will enjoy the argument.

   Mark the two or three findings you want to raise in your first five minutes as Key. Drag the findings into the order the evening will run: context first, then the questions, section by section.

5. 5

   Choose the questions and write the welcome

   Fourteen people in ninety minutes get through eight or ten questions, not thirty. Keep the ones that made you reach for the book, reword them in the way you talk, and delete the rest. If a question needs a line of the text in front of everyone, give the chapter and quote a few words, no more.

   Then write the overview yourself: a short welcome, why this book is on the list, the date and room, and anything members should know before they start, such as which edition the chapter numbers follow. Your assistant does not write this part. It is the club’s voice, and it is yours.

6. 6

   Share one link per meeting

   Two weeks before the meeting, press Share on the book’s document. Leave out your own Organiser’s notes finding from its page, and any finding you would rather raise in the room than print. Copy the link as it appears; it is shown once. Put it in the library’s newsletter and on the sign-up sheet at the desk, and add a password if you would rather it stayed with the club.

   Members read the welcome, the background and the questions, without your highlights or margin notes. The panel shows how many times the link has been read, a fair guess at how many are coming. Members cannot comment on the link; what they say belongs to the meeting.

7. 7

   Record the evening and look across the year

   After the meeting, add a finding, What we said, with the questions that took off, the one nobody touched, and the book people want next. Leave names out. Star the documents for the books the club loved; in December, they are the shortlist for next year’s list.

   By autumn the shelf’s index starts to show the year’s threads: Wharton in two documents because the club read Ethan Frome too, Pulitzer across four. For the themes the index cannot hold, such as marriage or class, search with Look up.