Most book clubs are doing it wrong (2017)
jsomers.net
jsomers.net
This kinda misses the point of most book clubs. The point is to have an excuse to meet and talk to people - the book is secondary. In fact many people come to book clubs without having read that month's book, just for the social outlet. Perhaps that's silly from a literary perspective but it still serves a purpose.
I've always treated book clubs more like a shared class and get extremely frustrated when someone shows up without reading the book/chapters ("they're just wasting everyone's time") or when conversation temporarily drifts to non-book-related topics. I go to book clubs for the insights and commentary I get on books from people with different life experiences, reading history, etc. There's plenty of other places you can go if you just want to be social.
I've definitely seen more "social" book clubs, too. I just assumed they were "bad" or not serious, but I guess they're just targeted at people wanting something different out of the book club experience.
There is not? People don't socialize without excuse and did not for years. People who want to socialize have to pick a hobby or interest and try there. It may be sport, bookclub, game, something technical, whatever, but it must be something.
Using hobbies is a great way to make friends if you enjoy that hobby. I just think it's a little disingenuous to go to a book club for something other than the book; it feels like going to the gym to just try to chat people up, or really any hobby-related gathering where you don't really care about the hobby. If you're not going to read the book for a book club, it just seems like you might have better luck finding shared hobbies with people at a different kind of club.
Then again, that's just my opinion of what my ideal book club looks like, but that's in no way the "right" way. Social book clubs are probably a great way to get more people to read things they otherwise wouldn't; I just don't get as much out of those kinds of book clubs.
Uh, what? I (and I imagine a good 50%+ of the hacker news readership, perhaps 75%+ if you exclude the USA) am never going to go to either of those without already knowing people.
> generic meetups, smallgroups, dog parks,
Places where you have nothing in common, so nothing to easily bond over (such as a book you've all read)
> volunteering, taking a class
Things where you should be focusing on something else, not socialising (such as in your ideal bookclub).
> If you're not going to read the book for a book club, it just seems like you might have better luck finding shared hobbies with people at a different kind of club.
What makes a book club different to any other hobby club? Or are you saying that you should only go to any hobby meetup if you're a "hardcore" hobbyist?
Because that leaves basically no way to meet people with common interests.
The practical problem with this is that services are at, what 9 in the morning on a sunday? The only communion i have any interest in taking at that time is with the cold side of the pillow.
But say the holy spirit [1] moves me to overcome that. Then what? "Yeah miss me with the biscuits padre, i'm just here for the bants!", not sure how well this is going to go down.
[1] whisky
They, of course, hope to "convert" you. Many seem to take pride in never "giving up" on someone no matter how long it takes.
But yes, going just to meet people is the wrong attitude, but better than not going.
(BTW. it's an old issue; there was even an old episode of Friends making fun of the conflict between joining a book club to learn vs. joining just to socialize.)
My experience from running a Hackerspace is that you need both. Time to talk about everything and nothing, and then time of focus for the people to actually practice their shared hobby. Otherwise everyone may just as well go to a bar for a beer.
Honestly, there's probably a sizeable 'market' for 'fairly broad interest group of strangers goes to a pub'.
In my mind a book club was a group of middle aged women drinking wine and talking about Fifty Shades of Gray. And even that I thought was just a cliche and not an actual thing.
Are book clubs actually a thing that people regularly take part in?
I've been part of several book clubs. It's definitely a thing people still do. But, it's not the social event of the year or anything like that.
> Using hobbies is a great way to make friends if you enjoy that hobby
That is literally the exactly same thing as books club. Books club is not special, it is yet another hobby used for socialization.
You don't go to gym to meet people, because gym is individual activity. But people do go to sports clubs to sport a bit and chat a lot.
Everywhere is my guess.
Some examples:
1. People go to their “local”. You probably already know people there, but you don’t when you first go if you are new to the area.
2. When you are out of town. Bars near convention centers can great places to meet interesting people. My local happens to be one.
3. When the bar has a theme you and your tribe like. It’s an easy way to meet new people you like. In larger cities, the bar scene is constantly evolving.
4. For live music. Having lived in Austin, there are great shows every night of the week. Yes, you usually invite friends, but there are some shows that I would not miss even if my friends didn’t want to go.
5. After a long day, I will sometimes choose to go to a bar alone and that is not likely to have anyone I know as customers. Sometimes I want to be around people and have a drink, but I don’t want to interact with anyone.
6. Same as 5, but I just want to read a long-form essay or a book.
I’m sure there are more.
Alternate theories are...
1. I'm doing it wrong.
2. I'm going to big city bars where people don't talk to strangers.
I've never been to a book club, but at least it's an event specifically for people to talk to each other.
Try sitting at the bar itself. Assuming you are at a social bar rather than a speed bar (i.e., one where they are slinging drinks at a mile a minute), a good bartender will talk to you a bit, and that’s often a way to get the ball rolling.
I will also add that some bars are more social than others, even though they may seem very similar on the surface. I don’t really know why, but it could be the clientele, it could be the bartenders, or it could just be that specified time/day.
For example, I've met plenty of neighborhood friends by going to live music nights at nearby bars and restaurants. The music was an "excuse" to go to a place I didn't know anyone.
In my city, there's also been bar nights specifically about meeting people, think speed dating but without the emphasis on dating.
I think this can be said for many group-class-like workouts though.
0.) Daytime activity so you get sleep and don't have to drink.
1.) Regular membership - meeting same people over and over again so that friendship can happen after months.
2.) Regular time and place so it is easy to add to schedule, agree with partner on who has kids and so on.
3.) Good fallback for when you dont fit in initially. Common topic.
4.) Safety. It is safer then party with strangers.
5.) Excuse. People need excuse to socialize. Socializing is seen as waste of time or as being bad parent. The club gives excuse for why you are not lazy for doing it.
If you have hard time getting along with random people and you need time to open up and get confident with others that is really bad idea. I think book club where mostly the same people who are also less outgoing is better option.
> Monthly social book club, not too serious, new faces always welcome.
> Monthly book club exploring everything from X to Y with a focus on Z. Newcomers wanting a place to discuss how P Qs R with like-minded friends always welcome.
What is wrong with people wanting to go to that type of party?
I think every hobby related group I have participated has had that to a certain extent. During sports activities people talk about other stuff. At the gym, people joke around. In debates club when I was in school we talked about other stuff. Hell, even at a hackathon, maybe 5-10% of the conversation is not about the app or the hackathon. Even the journal club in grad school always started and ended with non-science talk. I have never been frustrated.
People are social, and there is value to creating multifaceted connections with other people.
It can be helpful if expectations are out there (and people are a little flexible).
First of all, the group I'm in tends to read mostly non-fiction books about history, philosophy, science, social issues, and economics. I've never thought about it before, but this is perhaps one big reason why people can drop in and have a good discussion even if they didn't read the book. People have opinions about these subjects and personal experiences that are often interesting even if they didn't read "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City" or "Why Buddhism is True".
That said, it can also get frustrating and annoying at times, particularly when people pile on with counter-arguments that the author has already carefully addressed. Then I sometimes find myself having to articulate a low-fidelity version of the author's argument and defend it, when the book obviously does a better version of that. I tend to see these experiences as just part of the price for this kind of book group.
We make other trade-offs as well. The group is advertised on Meetup and it's a part of a secular humanist organization I'm in, which means people come for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they saw the book and were intrigued by it, others are curious about or identify with humanism in general, occasionally people seem to be new to the US and want to practice their English and reading. These different groups are inconsistent in their attendance as you can imagine. There's a core group that came for whatever reason and got "drawn in" with the community and the types of discussions and come back most months. Then there are people who only come if they liked that particular book. Then there are people we'll never see again.
In other words, we have a higher churn rate than the "group of friends" or "high commitment" book clubs probably do, so we need to bring in more people. But this also has its advantages, because I meet all kinds of people in jobs, age groups, and parts of the bay area that I would never normally meet, and hear interesting stories from different walks of life.
Overall I think our club serves a good purpose - it gets people out of the house, meeting others, and learning something new from a book each month, even if we're not "sucking the marrow out" of the book and only getting a more superficial benefit.
Okay, I need to find me a book club like this. That sounds legit amazing. I sort of assumed book clubs were always about novels. On the other hand, I'm not sure how easy it is to find book clubs in Germany ...
But seriously, some of them have nice online community and discussion. I’m not familiar with the term “shared class” and an internet search didn’t reveal anything specific.
> Book club, for us, isn’t about reading the same book; it’s about reading a book together.
> The idea is to make book club less an obligation than a sort of pleasant presence in our lives, this thing that’s always there.
> That’s another reason to break a book into pieces: better to have too little to fit into a session than too much; god forbid you read something complex and demanding — do you really want to spend three hours in the unpacking, or to have the session break down before the unpacking’s done?
I agree with the author's conclusions - and have a book club that operates the same way. And I agree with him because it's a better social experience. (A chance to catch up with others with happen to share book reading as a hobby without needing to do homework.)
- Will new people be willing to join in the middle of a book?
- If people don't like the book, do they just have to stick around for the next N meetings? If not, does it lose its place in their routine causing them to forget about it?
I think these concerns may be specific to more "open-access" book groups that anyone can join, rather than long-running groups of existing friends.
However, if you’re doing it long-term, I much prefer just talking about what you’re reading right now. Over time, you will start to read each other’s recommendations and the discussion will catch up.
I’m sure there are a lot of ways to do this. (OH and it’s awesome that you fessed up about skimming the article - I am there with you the rest of the time. :D)
Mistaking “book club” for “book class” isn’t a small category error.
He's written articles like https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship... which was one of the best pieces of writing on technology and humans that I've read recently. This is not the work of a recluse (the undesirable negative connotations aside).
I mean he's the one telling people that they're doing their hobby 'wrong'... I’m sure he can accept criticism if he’s going to issue it uninvited himself.
Sometimes you need to pretend that you're being responsible!
I think overall this is probably good for the clubs, assuming it's easy to create a new one. A bunch of smaller groups seems more pleasant than one increasingly unwieldy group.
That applies to all repeated social events, doesn't it?
Unless it is something that has an annual "new class", but that's also a "right time".
“‘Formerly, when a New England family convoked a ‘bee’ (that is, a meeting for working in common), it was for all concerned one of the most pleasurable times of the year. The work was scarcely more than a pretext for coming together.’ The activity of sustaining social relations and human contacts predominated over the technical scheme of things and the obligation to work, which were secondary causes.”
and drink wine or coffee!
> My book club started four years ago to read Infinite Jest.
Well SHEESH -- most book clubs aren't trying to read 1,079 page long books. Of course you're going to need to break that up.
But the idea that anyone else is doing it "wrong" is both nonsensical and incredibly arrogant. Book clubs are usually concerned with much shorter books that are more easily accessible, where of course you can understand each others' insights afterwards.
And for me, the goal isn't just (or even primarily) to understand the book better or "cash in", as it is more to understand your friends better and enjoy time together. Even if you haven't read the book at all, you can go to hear what they have to say and discuss the topics raised generally.
(If your goal is primarily to understand the book better, you'll probably get a lot more out of reading reviews, analysis, etc. online that meeting with friends, unless your friends happen to be English professors, writers for the New Yorker, etc.)
Relevant questions: what bookclubs was the author familiar with? and what books were they reading?
The bookclubs I'm familiar with are all run by and for the sake of their members, and if the goal is either encourage regular reading or just social, they'll checkpoint at the same pace regardless of the book (eg every 2-4 weeks) and decide how much to read depending... on the book?
The idea that most bookclubs wouldn't do this seems very bizarre to me, and I just can't imagine the sampling the author had done prior to this post
A bookclub is not a class. For most people it’s an excuse to get together, have a drink and talk about a thing they like in a lightly structured manner. What OP is describing sounds more like a study group.
If I don’t like the book I don’t want to read it for months and months.
The 1-2 women that were actually serious about book analysis quit the book club.
One is exactly how you said, and the other had a host who a list of prepared questions and trivia to discuss, and pretty much goes down her list each time, and everyone gets a chance to answer each if they have anything.
I've found value in both types. I learn more from the latter, usually, but I enjoy the former, too.
I like the idea of a weekly club with partial book assignments, but that's more time than a lot of people are able (or willing) to give it.
This club format is not just great for improving English (you develop listening, reading and speaking skills at the same time), but also have become one of the most favourite activity of mine during the week – we usually meet in some lovely place in the Saturday morning, drink coffee with croissants, meet wonderful smart people, discuss life and books, while enjoying views on Sagrada Familia.
Having this experience, idea of reading silently at home and then meeting once to briefly share the opinion about a book, doesn't sound exciting at all :)
What books did you read and how was this event initiated?
a) Many non-fiction books are effectively a 'very good essay' in the first couple chapters, followed by N*100 pages of lower-quality expansion on the initial topic. It's completely OK if most people in the meeting don't read the whole thing. It's also much easier to skip around in non-fiction books, since the chapters are often more modular.
b) We would have a rotating 'moderator' who generally read the whole book, usually before it got picked up by the group. The moderator generally picks a subset of 'good chapters' which people can read if they aren't going to get through the whole book. Usually intro + chapter 1 + two later chapters with the best points.
c) For non-fiction, outside experience is often just as valuable to the discussion as having read the book. Having a really relevant person involved int he discussion is fantastic.
d) We also had a some great experiences with inviting the author to the discussion group, for books written by people who live in the area. We would often get ~20 people to turn out for these ones, and the authors were very happy to come talk about the thing they care about to even our small group.
Also, some books just don't lead to much discussion because they don't have any overarching theme -- some are collections of anecdotes and short episodes that are often fun to read but don't provide much to talk about beyond "what did you learn that most surprised you?" or "which section was your favorite?"
I wonder if an essay club, rather than a book club, would work. You pick something short enough that it's easy to read, but still with enough ideas in to talk about. You then have time to either dig into the text really deeply, or use it as a prompt for a largely unrelated but still interesting conversation, HN comments style.
The problem I think is that the economics of writing books is much more author-friendly than writing longform articles. So by the time you put a shitpile of research into writing something /good/, you really should be writing a book. Even if the 'cream' of the content is about three chapters. And the rest of the deep dive is still worth it for many readers (and those who aren't reading the whole book for book club can still go back for the rest later, if they want to).
I'd be interested in a format suggested by the author, but I think I'm the only one in my book club that would. The fact that I'm regularly reading and talking about books with a group without any particular literary bent is something very valuable to me, even if we don't mine every hidden treasure of the books we read.
Especially given current circumstances, this would possibly help you meet the analysis goal
It wasn't an excuse to meet and kvetch. It was closer to a class. It was about the books. Every other book club I've been in has been a pale imitation. The one I'm in now is stocked with PhDs and Berkeley profs and isn't even a drone fest. It doesn't even reach a high school level of engagement with the material.
Our sports club is sidelined because of the quarantine. So I'll admit, they're not very good at this. I'm going to suggest that we read books about the sport next time.
At my secondary school, the drama society put on a production of Oedipus Rex [1]. The scene where Oedipus blinds himself was so graphic that some of the younger pupils screamed and fled the hall.
[1] Which title my Greek teacher was furious about. It's either Οἰδίπους Τύραννος or Oedipus the King, there's no reason to use a Latin name.
1. Meet every 3 to 6 months.
2. Everyone bring books to swap.
3. Everyone bring a list of books they really loved.
4. Each person takes turn talking about the books they loved while sitting around a dining room table with snacks and drinks.
5. It's fun if other people have read the same books. It's even more fun if they disagree.
6. Last time I did this I added 10 books to my "To Read Pile" and traded books with friends.
7. Everyone wanted to do it again.
1. Find 10-20 friends
2. Go on holiday for a week in a cottage in the middle of nowhere with terrible internet speed
3. Bring a dozen books each and put them in a huge pile in the middle of one room
4. Eat a lovely big meal together in the evening
5. Mercilessly shame anyone who is doing anything other than reading a book, cooking, or performing essential biological functions before dinner time
You don't all read the same book, but there will be plenty of overlap, and it usually works out that there are a few books that many people have read.
It gets people talking about the _why of the books_, particularly why they found it interesting, or what ticked for them. This makes for a more engaging discussion.
After a couple of them with similar people, there’s inherently a dialogue about which books you previously had taken or brought, why you chose to bring a particular book this time. The general context is very literary focused by framing.
I have been running a book club for the past year and a half and that is a fair summary of how it goes. It is definitely hard to keep a discussion on topic for more than a couple of hours without it becoming a generic social event, especially if there are late arrivals. Productivity of work meetings tends to approach zero after an hour; so why should it be different for book clubs? Denser books should require more discussion, but doing it in a single session is hard. The social aspect is fun and is a part of why I run the book club I do, but it is a competing priority with the book itself and different people in the club prioritize the two differently. The prioritization changes for everyone as time progresses and the amount of alcohol consumed increases.
Recommendation of having smaller meetings while the book is in progress deserves a trial. I will adopt it for the next book in my club. While we are holding these virtually, it seems that people are having easier time parceling an hour of their evening time so this will be practical.
There are a few things that differentiates my book club from the authors description of how a typical book club operates. Firstly, I select the book that I want to read and I think my friends will enjoy that is of appropriate time investment. This means there is no griping about book selection and having to competing desires of multiple people. Secondly there is a set schedule: 7:30pm on the first Monday of every other month at my apartment. This means there is no griping about choice of venue (an issue in NYC) and rescheduling to fit prior commitments the participants have. I make an announcement on Facebook and people have a choice to participate or not. This has been working out rather well with turns outs of somewhere between half a dozen to a dozen friends depending on the book. Conversations have been good and organizational investment very reasonable.
There are a few ways to increase the chance of a book club:
(1) Reduce the reading length per session.
(2) Provide a carrot to encourage ppl to do the reading.
These two levers led a few friends and I to start something called Short Story Club [1], which is really starting to take off now.
It's relatively easy to get folks to read a 30-40 page short story, and we try to provide a free copy so people don't have to make a purchase. IMO short stories are super underrated and overlooked - many of them pack a punch bigger than the average novel.
We start each session with small group discussions over Zoom.
For the carrot, we get the author of the short story to come on the Zoom and do a Q&A session, letting attendees ask their questions directly via video like in a real event. So far, we've focused on science fiction, and we've gotten Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, and Cory Doctorow to join us.
So, even if you're not doing short stories for your own book club, a better way is to chunk up big books and meet periodically. Make it an event: if in person make an effort to cook or provide good snacks, music, whatever it takes to make it easy for people to commit to. And have good discussion points ready.
[1] https://www.shortstory.club - if you're interested, we have Hugh Howey coming next week to discuss WOOL, one of my fav stories
If anyone’s interested, it is the Grey Company podcast, which began as a podcast discussing the Lord of the Rings card game, but branched out to doing the afore mentioned read through of Lord of the Rings.
Also of interest is Tolkien Road, a podcast which reads through and discusses the Silmarillion and other Tolkien works in a bit by bit fashion.
As a literature graduate, this made me laugh. Maybe literature courses are more leisurely stateside, but for me it was a book a week (not 4 to 6 weeks, as OP suggests). That was literally how classes were run.
And it was stupid for the reasons outlined. I remember my class on Ulysses mostly because a) I was acutely conscious of not having been fully keeping up in the 250 pages before the closing chapter and b) when I arrived at class it became clear after about 2 minutes that only I had finished it, because I had read it over the summer break because I was really keen on those bragging rights, but everyone else has tried to read it in one week, which is a doomed endeavour if ever there was one. It would have been a better experience for everyone concerned if more than one person had done the reading, but that was not realistic on the assumption that Ulysses can be polished off in the same time as The Power and the Glory.
Just like you need terms like "intramural" and "club" to differentiate the type of sports team to which you belong there seems to be a need for a common and well understood differentiation between book groups which are primarily social and which are geared toward analysis and/or study.
The objectives of the two groups don't seem to mesh well at all so perhaps they are deserving of their own terms.
The author seems to be describing a study group, not a book club.
It would be fun to work on a project together every weekend.
Would be fun to have this person attend a knitting club. Their head would probably explode.
Amazon's Kindle has this capability -- but I've never heard anyone who's actually taken advantage of it.
https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/677-share-your-kindle-no...
I have this idea in the back of my mind for a while, which is a mailing list or forum where members agree to read a specific book every 2 weeks and then write a review about it or discuss it online.
every member gets to suggest a book as what to read next and whatever suggestion gets the most votes will be read. it would be highly specific to keep the communities small enough and to really dive deep on certain works/authors. this could be done using categories. a category has certain rules for the books to be read, and could be titles which are at least 100 years old (my pet peeve), in the public domain, and limited to n-authors, ... one could then also have all future readings be descendents of that category/author (e.g. in follow-up readings read only/everything that an author has cited, or things they have read etc). kind of like a snow-ball system. but there are many ways how to structure this to make it interesting for different crowds.
It's more of a broadcast style bookclub (although iiuc, you can contribute to discussion via discord), but it could meet your needs
https://www.old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/3ibtw5/the_many_...
The idea is that each participant sends some money into the pool – 10 euros in that particular case – and commit to read a book from the list in 3 weeks. (There was a prepared list of diverse set of books like "You must be joking, Mr. Feynman" or "Freakonomics"). By the end of the challenge, a simple oracle mechanism was used to determine who read a book or not – everyone was randomly assigned a few people who have chosen the same book and had to make a call to talk about a book and check if person have read it. Once verification was done, money from the pool have been divided between people who read the book.
I especially loved that concept due to the fact that it's almost exactly what people in cryptocommunity try to do with tokens and cryptoeconomy – create economic incentives (in a new way), new oracles (mechanisms of connecting economic system to the offline world) and change peoples behavior in the socially beneficial way.
But this time it was done just with a mobile banking app and a Google Forms.
i've always wanted to start a salon (insert lots of excuses for why i haven't here).
This is obviously true for non fiction programming books where you can spend years developing a library off of ideas from a single chapter but I was also surprised to learn that it's also true for fiction books. My girlfriend doesn't mind spoilers in novels because she reasons if a book isn't good enough with spoilers it's probably not good enough without the spoilers too.
The goal should be to enjoy reading not read, it's deceptively unproductive to force yourself to finish a book.
In reality books, like any form of communication are incredibly diverse on the production as well on the consumption side. A novel is very different than a reference. A teaching book is very different than a biography. Some books are more about the journey - some are more about the destination.
There are many different ways to consume (some or all of) a book. And that’s driven by both: how it was written and what a reader wants out of it at that moment in time.
Books are one of the manifestations of the incredible plurality in our species.
though I agree that most books which I read which stay with me mentally and where I see myself going back to them are far from easy. These are in the class of being at least x years old (Jacques Ellul, Marx, Mumford, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Zapffe, Heidegger, Foucault, Bertrand Russel, Cioran, Dostoyevski, Kafka, Orwell, Sinclair, J. Austin ...) and preferably in the public domain.
A book which I never read at least twice isn't something I'd consider having an impact on me. But then sometimes drifting aimlessly with "wtf did I just read?" moments has more impact/effect on me than anything that is listed as a great classic. So there is no reason to be elitist imho (and I can't overstate the _humble_ here since 20 years ago I thought Dean Koontz novels were the bees knees).
[1] "Bill Bryson", John Cleese, or the absolutely hilarious "Let's Pretend This Never Happened" by Jenny Lawson.
But I'll grant that any given set of ideas and concepts and wild fancy in any form of literature, this conglomeration, is truly strengthened by frequent mindful re-visits. Whatever the subject.
Books are up to the interest of the reader, on behalf of the author. Getting through one, in one or many sittings, is a pretty nice endeavour.
Shit, I’ve been doing it wrong all these years. Thanks for setting me straight.
I'm curious to hear if anyone has stories, success or otherwise, and methods on organizing a non-fiction study group.
(Assume: small groups, serious and experienced participants.)
Bonus marks for any "bear in minds" and "gotchas" when a plague forces you to resort to online group readings and discussions.
This evening I'll be out at a nearby nature reserve with a fellow serious participant to talk about organizing an advanced study/discussion group on Greek & Roman philosophy -- mostly Hellenistic.
Thanks for the input, xapata, much appreciated.
The Metaphysical Club https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OI1AF2
I even made a discussion blog for the group at the time, I wanted more discussion about each piece in the comments, but it didn't take off.
I did consider organizing something like it myself. Getting exclusively such high-quality attendees seems unlikely in a non-university setting. Discussion quality would seem the tricky thing, anyway. Maybe I'm spoiled, because I've seen how good it can get. Good luck!
Luckily, I live in the vicinity of a 200-year old university. So I might first inquire at the Arts & Philosophy department.
Thanks, again. :-)
How about IJ? Have you folks made any progress at all on guessing what maybe actually happens? For example do we know anything at all about Hal and Gately digging up JOI's head? Even for example what possible use that would be to anybody?
In regards to the ongoing nature of book clubs, discussing every chapter, I think is is a great idea, and the best avenue I've seen it happen through is a medium like Reddit (or Tildes.net), with a nested forum post for each chapter that people can not only look back on now but in the future. Indeed, r/bookclub and even other media related subreddits, like r/anime or your favorite TV show like r/gameofthrones, have such weekly threads for reading or rewatching the requisite media. This feels to me the best way to accomplish the author's goals. Of course, there is no real social interaction, but again, if you want social interaction, go to a social event that is explicitly (or sufficiently implicitly) stated that it is for socialization, such as a pub gathering. No one's going to be reading books with their friends at a pub.
To get a conversation started, but it doesn't matter where it ends up.
Do you understand people making smalltalk and the purpose of it? It's like that.
Sure, I get smalltalk, and I now understand the dichotomy of book club types. Some people are expecting book clubs to be casual and others hardcore. Our definitions are not the same so our conclusions as to what book clubs should be are also not the same. I like both approaches but I like them to be delineated. If I'm with my friends I can appreciate it being a social gathering with a theme, but if I attend a "hardcore" book club, well, I expect it to be hardcore, talking about the book itself for most of the time.
What's your idea of a good first date?