Week 9 - Book Club Experience

 

I decided to experiment with participating in an online book club for this assignment. After a bit of research, I found a 2023 article from The Washington Post focused on finding the right online book club, which is where I discovered the app, Fable. There was a plethora of book clubs to choose from, so many that it was almost overwhelming to try to find just one. After browsing and considering, I decided to choose two clubs, one with a small community of participants and one large, to see if the size of the club noticeably affected the discussion experience. 

I am going to keep the names of the clubs and the participants anonymous, but will say at the time of my participation, the smaller club didn’t have a specific genre it focused on, had a total of 18 members, and covered the book, Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar; the larger club focused on romance titles (covering a variety of subgenres), had a little over 1,800 members, and covered the book, Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver.

Each club had a designated moderator, responsible for selecting the title to be discussed, setting the schedule (reading milestones), and starting the discussion with a ‘kickoff’ post. Chapters, or sets of chapters, were their own separate threads, where posts and replies could be contained and discussed without the potential for spoilers. Each club was asynchronous; there were no set dates/times in which to post for each thread, and participation was entirely voluntary. The only dates set beforehand were the starting and ending dates for the chosen title, otherwise participants could comment and reply at their leisure. 

Neither of the moderators provided a set of official questions, nor referenced what I would consider “book club questions”, which I found slightly disappointing. Throughout the readings for both clubs, there wasn’t really a discussion being held, rather each chapter/set of chapters had its own thread where participants could post their thoughts and respond to one another. While I did find enjoyment in this type of interaction (for Butcher & Blackbird specifically, it was so full of hilarious quotes and interactions between the main characters, that I found myself commonly responding with a few other like-minded participants), I was looking forward to a more structured discussion environment. Even with the interactions I mentioned about swapping funny moments with the B&B crowd, I didn’t feel like we were stealing the spotlight away from the “main” discussion, in fact, for a lot of the chapter posts, we were the only ones posting any content at all. 

As for general participation, even though the moderators didn’t provide a “structured book club discussion” (as I was expecting), that’s not to say they didn’t interact at all; for sections that didn’t seem to have conversations being started, they at least posted their personal thoughts, and for sections that did have comments/replies, they also provided their thoughts and sometimes expanded on others’ comments. Regarding participation, I had more involved and varied replies from the larger book club; when I made my choices selecting a small and large club, I assumed the smaller club would provide more in-depth discussion, because it was smaller and felt more ‘cozy’, however, I was proven wrong, as I actually had more varied and enjoyable interactions in the large club. 

Unfortunately, since these were clubs held entirely online, no snacks or drinks were provided, other than what I might have been partaking of at the time of posting comments or replies :) 

I would try another book club from Fable in the future, but I would definitely dig a bit more when researching, to see if the moderator provides or references book club-style questions, in order to guide a more focused discussion.

Reference

[Fable app icon]. (2024). Google Play. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.fable.fable&hl=en_US&pli=1