Welcome to Season Ten of Linking Our Libraries! We are so happy to have you join us again! This is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and our members are all types of libraries and their staff. I’m Mary, the director. It’s so good to have you here also. In this podcast, we talk about the skills library staff need to be successful and to help them to serve their communities.

This season we are talking about library programs – giving you some ideas about different ideas you can try in your own library. It is always good to share ideas across libraries, and we are all better! Each week we will look at a different theme of programs.

This week we are talking about a very standard library program: book groups!

We’re in the end of the big holiday season, and everyone is tired of celebrating – and ready to start some resolutions for the new year. Reading more books is a pretty common resolution; book groups of all types can be helpful to your patrons – and fun for you!

These can be a big assortment of different kinds of programs, and for any age in your library. They can be regularly scheduled, or can be one time special events. They could be storytime for toddlers or travel books for senior citizens in assisted living. Our usual brand is books, no matter what kind of library you are in; and people who like our mission will want to come talk about the books in your collection. The rest is limited only by your imagination!

Let’s talk about a few different types of book groups.

Silent Book Group

If you have always wanted to be part of a book group, but don’t want to bother with all the talking or reading the same books as everyone else, this may be your book group! You can design these for kids, teens, or adults – anyone who wants to read a book and to be with other people, but not to have the socialization time. (Although, you can of course include some socialization time too!)

“Silent Book Club is a global community of readers and introverts, with 300 chapters around the world led by local volunteers. SBC members gather in person and online to read together in quiet camaraderie.

Silent Book Club started in 2012 with a couple of friends—Guinevere de la Mare and Laura Gluhanich—reading in companionable silence at our neighborhood bar in San Francisco. We loved books, and reading with friends, but most of our previous attempts at book clubs had fizzled out.

We started Silent Book Club because reading with friends enriches our lives and makes us happy. We love hearing about what people are reading (often in their other book clubs) and we think it’s important to put down our phones and be social. Real, live, breathing-the-same-air social, not hearting-you-on-Instagram social.

Silent Book Club is about community. Everyone is welcome, and anyone can join or launch a chapter. We encourage people all over the world to start their own Silent Book Clubs. All you need is a friend, a café, and a book. We have active chapters around the world in cities of all sizes, and new chapters are being launched by volunteers every week.”

Of course, there are a lot of libraries that have jumped onto this idea! Here are a few:

• Cannon Falls public library: “Grab a book and join us by the fireplace for some quiet, quality reading time in silent solidarity with a few fellow book-lovers. It’s the perfect excuse to escape for a while and get some serious reading done. Meets on the Teenth Tuesday of every month.” (last one was Dec 13th)
• Exeter Community Library: “Silent Book Club meets the last Thursday of each month at 6:30 PM, each month at a different location! Silent Book club is all about taking time to read and enjoy a good book with friends and fellow readers all while helping support a local business!”
• Pequot Library: “Join fellow like-minded readers at the Pequot Library’s Silent Book Club. Read, relax, and discuss your favorite books in our historic 1894 building. Hosted the third Thursday of every month.”

Book Tasting:

This book group is a special event type. A lot of the material about this is focused on middle grade readers or maybe high school students – programs that happen in school libraries. But it would be fun for adults also!

This can be as simple or as elaborate as you want to make it. The idea is that your participants feel like they are in a restaurant, and they are having a chance to sample a variety of different books. Consider setting up the tables in your library so that they look like a restaurant. If you really want to be elaborate, put out menus, wear a chef’s apron and hat, have place cards, or escort your patrons to their seats.

You may want to start by giving instructions on what it means to sample a book. Talk about looking at the cover art, reading the back cover, looking through a table of contents, or looking at the index. Tell them to think about what other kinds of things that they would use to make a decision about whether they like a book or not. 

Everyone gets a few books as their first course, with each table sampling a different set of books. Spend a few minutes, then either shift the books from table to table, or let the patrons shift themselves from table to table. The whole thing can take maybe an hour. And then at the end, let everyone look through the notes that they have taken about their book sampling, and of course encourage them to go home with the books that they looked at –  and maybe even offer a variety of other potentially good books. If everyone leaves your book tasting with a handful of books, then it was a total success. 

Of course there are a variety of libraries that have sampled this program. We link to a few of them in the show notes page. 

• Cuyahoga County Public Library: they hosted a teen book group
• A high school teacher’s blog: “Books were stacked on the silver trays with “menus” and they gave Yelp reviews for each book. At each table, I also put a flip menu with each book’s summary so they could read that as well. I included all these different access points to books so they could have it after the book tasting to look back on.”
• Bloomington Public Library: “Children in Grades 2-5 will engage in this fun activity which will introduce them to a wide array of books … a perfect opportunity for adding books to those summer reading logs! This program will take place outdoors on the Library’s Patio.”
• Medina Junior-Senior High School: assorted links: Book Tasting Menu, Mrs. O’Toole’s Example Menu, Book Tasting Presentation, Book Tasting Survey
• Waller High School: “During the book tasting, books were set out on multiple tables based on genre. Students rotated to three tables and had 10 minutes to explore a book and its genre. As they read the first three pages of a book, students filled out a questionnaire detailing their first impressions. To add a fun twist, Cox along with aide Cindy Schmidt gave the tasting a spooktacular theme. Along with spooky decorations and dressing up, they set out themed snacks such as gummy worms, marshmallows, and candy corn.”

Virtual Book Groups:

Some libraries have these programs, but there are a lot of places that offer this program. We all learned to be more online over the course of the pandemic, and this kind of program is useful for patrons as well as being fun. You can have a synchronous program, where everyone joins in together; or you can make it more flexible for people who want to read with others but can’t commit to a specific time.

• Goodreads Groups:
  • Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge: “This group is for people participating in the Popsugar reading challenge for 2022 & 2023. The Popsugar website posted a reading challenge that included a list of 40 different ways to choose your next book to read plus an additional 10 for an “advanced challenge”. In this group we will follow those lists (whether you do all 50 or stick to 40) to choose books to read for the year. Starting January 1, we will compare books, lists and the number of books we’ve all read from the list. Anyone is welcome in this group so feel free to invite your friends! Be sure to check our weekly update posts for latest information on polls, group reads, etc.”
  • Addicted to YA: If you’re addicted to Young Adult books then come join. Here you can share your thoughts about YA books and just be yourself around people who like the same kind of books. Come participate in the group discussions about the books and the characters. New members are always welcome!
  • Literary Fiction by People of Color: This can include genre fiction that is literary (e.g. speculative fiction, historical fiction, etc.), as long as it’s written by a person of color (African-American, Asian-American, Latino/a, Native American, Middle Eastern).
  •  Horror Aficionados: If you love horror literature, movies, and culture, you’re in the right place. Whether it’s vampires, werewolves, zombies, serial killers, plagues, or the Old Ones, you’ll find plenty of great discussions and recommendations at HA.
  • Paranormal Romance & Urban Fantasy: Welcome to Paranormal Romance! This group is for the discussion and recommendation of paranormal romances and paranormal erotic romance, along with urban fantasy, science fiction, futuristic, and fantasy romance. If you love vampires, werewolves, and hot faery men, this is the group for you. Join up and discuss your favorite books!

• Bookclubs.com website: Readers wanted! Browse clubs that are open to the public and find the perfect book club for you.
  • Loc’d & Lit:  This club was created by two life-long friends, Alanna and Trish, who are in the beginning stages of their loc journey and who also share a mutual love of all things books! We hope to build a community of fellow readers where we can share our voices and opinions as they are not always heard or highlighted in the current mainstream book-sphere. Although we read multiple genres, we do have a focus on highlighting BIPOC stories and authors. So join us monthly as we discuss our latest read and touch upon all themes relevant to women today, whether it be: relationships, parenting, career, race, or life’s constant twists and turns. We hope to explore it all as we talk about the ways that we are inspired and grow though our favorite books.
  • Teacher Book Club: A book club designed for teachers to enjoy children’s chapter books! We read children’s books to inspire our class and enjoy some adventures of our own! We let you suggest the books you want to read, then we run a vote between two of those books. Whichever book has the highest amount of votes is the book we read for the next two months! We work on a bi-monthly basis to give teachers plenty of time to read the book. We have also been lucky enough to host some Instagram lives with the authors of the books we’ve read! We all join together for a chat at the end of the month to discuss the book and what we think our children at school will think of it! So if you’re a teacher, we would love for you to join us!
  • #BigBookNerdBuddyReads: We’re two bookish gals who’s friendship started on Instagram! We’ve read together for over a year now —and decided to open up our buddy reading to everyone. Join us on our next buddy read!

There are literally thousands of online book groups you might want to join, or that you might want to connect to with your own library group!

Bring some book groups to your library. They are such a good way to connect your collection with your patrons – the goal of every library!

Books Read

Now, let’s get to the part of every episode that is everyone’s favorite: sharing books! We will link to these books on our shownotes pages, and the link will take you to Amazon. You probably know this, but when you click one of our links and then buy anything at all from Amazon, they give us a small percentage of their profits. That support really helps us, and although it’s anonymous so we won’t know it was you – we appreciate you taking the time to help us!

• Merit Badge Murder (Merry Wrath Mysteries Book 1) Book 1 of 25: Merry Wrath Mysteries, by Leslie Langtry When CIA agent Merry Wrath is “accidentally” outted, she’s forced her into early retirement, changes her appearance, and moves where no one will ever find her—Iowa. Instead of black bag drops in Bangkok, she now spends her time leading a young Girl Scout troop. But Merry’s new simple life turns not-so-simple when an enemy agent shows up dead at scout camp. Suddenly Merry is forced to deal with her former life in order to preserve her future one.
  
  It doesn’t help matters that the CIA sends in her former, sexy handler to investigate…or that the hot new neighbor across the street turns out to be the local detective in charge of her case. And when Merry is forced to take on a roommate in the voluptuous form of a turned KGB agent/bimbo, things become trickier than wet work in Waukegan or cookie sales in the spring. Nothing in the CIA or Girl Scouts’ training manuals has prepared her for what comes next…
• The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (Bernie Rhodenbarr #12), by Lawrence Block Suppose you’re Bernie Rhodenbarr. You’ve got a dream job, running your own cozy secondhand bookstore, complete with Raffles, your caudally challenged cat. It’s in Greenwich Village, and your best friend’s dog grooming salon is two doors away, and the two of you lunch together and meet for drinks after work.

And you’ve got another way to make a buck. Every once in a while you put your conscience on the shelf and let yourself into someone else’s residence, and you leave with more than you came with. You’re a burglar, and you know it’s wrong, but you love it.

And you’re good at it. You’ve got two ways to make a living, one larcenous, the other literary and legitimate, and you’re good at both of them.

Nice, huh?

Until the 21st Century pulls the rug out from under you. All of a sudden the streets of your city are so overpopulated with security cameras and closed-circuit TV that you have to lock yourself in the bathroom to have an undocumented moment. And locks, which used to provide the recreational pleasure of a moderately challenging crossword puzzle, have become genuinely pickproof.

Meanwhile, internet booksellers have muscled your legit enterprise into obsolescence. The new breed of customers browse your bookshop, find what they’re looking for, then whip out their phones and order their books online.

Wonderful. You had two ways to make a living, and neither of them works anymore.

But suppose you keep on supposing, okay?

Suppose you wake up one morning in a world just like the one in which you fell asleep-but with a couple of differences.

The first one you notice doesn’t amount to much. The Metrocard in your wallet has somehow changed color and morphed into what seems to be called a SubwayCard. That’s puzzling, but you swipe it at the turnstile same as always, and it gets you on the subway, so what difference does it make?

But that’s not the only thing that’s changed. The Internet’s up and running, as robust as ever, but nobody seems to be using it to sell books. Doors are secured not with pickproof electronic gizmos but with good old reliable Rabson locks, the kind you can open with your eyes closed. And what happened to all those security cameras? Where’d they go?

All of a sudden you’ve got your life back, and your bookshop’s packed with eager customers, and how are you gonna find time to steal something?

Well, just suppose one of the world’s worst human beings has recently acquired one of the world’s most glamorous gems. When the legendary Kloppmann Diamond is up for grabs, what can you possibly do but grab it?

And what could possibly go wrong?

Conclusion

This was a quick overview of a few ideas that you might want to use in your library. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to everything discussed today. We are looking forward to chatting with you all season! We will have more ideas to help you keep your library running well, and strategies to help you serve your community.

And if you want to hear more book suggestions, be sure you are also subscribed to our other podcast: Reading With Libraries. Short episodes drop every Tuesday, and we look at different aspects of Minnesota. This season we look at a different historic site across the state each week, and then suggest six books that reference the site. Join us each week!