# A book club guide — author, context and questions for every meeting Recipe No. 44, Research and civic life. From The know.sh Cookbook: https://know.sh/cookbook/book-club-guide - For: the volunteer organiser of a library book club that reads ten books a year - You bring: the year’s reading list, your own copy of each book, the AI assistant you already use, and an hour with each guide a fortnight before the meeting - You get: a shelf with a document per book: the author, the book’s context and reception with every source credited, discussion questions by section that you have chosen, your introduction, and one read-only link per meeting for members - Time: an evening to set up the year, then about an hour per book, once you have read it - Keep it: private while you work; share one document by a read-only link The Alder Street Library book club meets on the second Tuesday of the month, ten months a year. Fourteen people come, give or take, and the organiser is whoever volunteered in 2019. The work is the same every month: find out who the author was and what the book was answering, see what critics said then and now, and have a dozen good questions ready for when the room goes quiet. Publishers' reading-group guides exist for some books, not others, and they are written to sell the book. This recipe keeps the whole year on one shelf. Each book is a research document. Whichever assistant you use, Claude, ChatGPT or a local model, does the legwork: it researches the author, the context and the reception on the web, files each as a finding with its sources, and drafts questions section by section. You check what it found, pick the questions, and write the introduction yourself. Members get one read-only link per meeting, on their phones or on the library's computers. The books stay on the library's shelves. know.sh holds your guide to them. ## What you will use - **Shelf**: One shelf for the club, *Alder Street Readers*, whose line gives the meeting day and room. - **Research document**: *The 2027 list*, with a finding per book, and one document per book titled with the month, the title and the author. - **Finding**: The author, the context and the reception as *Evidence* with sources; question sets as *Question*; your running notes as *Observation*. - **Your AI assistant**: Researches each book on the web, files what it finds with sources, and drafts questions for each section of the book. - **The editor**: Where you open every source, cut what does not hold up, choose and reword the questions, and write the introduction as the overview. - **Public link**: One read-only link per meeting, with your own notes left out, sent to members in the library newsletter. - **The A–Z index**: Gathers authors, characters and places that recur across the year: *Wharton*, *Olenska*, *Pulitzer*. - **The iOS app**: Read the questions from your phone at the meeting; the iOS app is in TestFlight beta. ## Method ### 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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**. ## Prompts to try Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, research the novel for my May meeting and file what you find in the document “May — [title] ([author], [year])” on my shelf Alder Street Readers. Add four Evidence findings: the author’s life as it bears on this book, when and why it was written, the world it describes, and its reception at publication and since. List every source on its finding. Credit each review by critic, publication and date, quote no more than a sentence, and do not copy or paraphrase any publisher’s reading-group guide. Tell me which sources you could not open. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, read the document “March — The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton, 1920)” on my shelf Alder Street Readers. Draft twelve open discussion questions for Book Two, grouped by chapters, as Question findings titled “Questions: Book Two, chapters …”. Each question should point to a scene and have no single right answer. Quote no more than a few words of the text, with the chapter number. Say which questions you based on the text and which on summaries. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, check every quotation in the document “March — The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton, 1920)” on my shelf Alder Street Readers. For each, tell me whether you can find it in the source the finding lists, and whether it runs past one sentence. Leave your answers as proposed notes on the findings; do not change my text. ## Variations - Run a classroom literature circle the same way, with a guide per book for students; the [unit study guide](/cookbook/class-study-guide) recipe shows a link built for a class. - For a club that reads one author for a year, add an author document of its own and have your assistant link each book’s guide to it. - Keep your private reading notes on every book, club or not, in a [commonplace book](/cookbook/commonplace-book), and link the club guide to them. - Library staff running several clubs can keep a shelf per club, so each has its own list and index. ## Where it falls short - Members read; they cannot comment, vote or add questions on the link. What they say reaches you at the meeting, by email or on the sign-up sheet. - Web research needs an assistant with web search, and it reads only the open web. Reviews behind newspaper paywalls and archive subscriptions are out of its reach, and it may not have read a recent book at all. - Links are one document each. There is no link to the whole year; share *The 2027 list* for the schedule, and each book’s guide in its month. - Smaller local models call tools less reliably and are more likely to invent a review. Check every source they file; Revisions shows each change they made. ## A note on quotation, credit and members’ privacy Assistants make mistakes, and they are good at inventing reviews that sound right. Open every source before it goes on a link, and credit each critic by name, publication and date. Keep quotations short, from a few words to a sentence, whether from the book or a review. *The Age of Innocence* was published in 1920, so it is in the public domain in the US; Wharton died in 1937, so it is out of copyright in countries that count seventy years from the author's death, too. Most books a club reads are still in copyright. Publishers' reading-group guides are their own copyrighted work: link to one if it helps, never copy it into your guide. A shared link can be forwarded. Keep members' names, emails and phone numbers off it, and if the club meets in someone's home, put the address in an email, not on the link. Indexed under: Book clubs, Discussion questions, Reading groups, Public domain, Book reviews, Libraries.