A Novel Idea Book Club

One of my 101 in 1001 ideas was to start a book club...finally! I was really excited about this idea because it has been something on the brain and on my heart for what felt like f-o-r-e-v-e-r!

I started it a few months ago and opened it up to my friends, including female military members, spouses, and civilians in the local area. It's a great way to encourage yourself to read and hold yourself accountable to not just bypass the written word for magazines, online articles, and blog posts (not that they're bad).  

However, my book club didn't have a name. It just hung out as the "Ladies' Book Club." Kinda feels a little naked.  

I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across the Popular feed. Instagram tailors it to find posts that are similar to the Instagram accounts that you follow. I am so glad I checked it out because I became Instagram friends with Delicious Reads, a Utah-based book club that has AWESOME book club meetings.

Delicious Reads has really fun, themed book club meetings.  They host the meetings at their homes and the members contribute to a delicious, literary-themed dinner.  They do fun activities in relation to what they read.  Like when they read The Husband's Secret and their discussion questions were handed out in envelopes as "secret letters," just like the book.  I think one of my favorites was their Walt Disney biography meeting.

I solicited some advice from their president and she was awesome! I found out some great tips for the structure of their book club and it inspired me to do some big changes.  First off, a renaming and A Novel Idea was born.  We've been picking our books out monthly and it has honestly wasted so much time.  It has taken a week to get book nominations and another week to simply vote.  So in taking a chapter out of Delicious Reads' plans, we are using our next meeting to select books for September through December and then the November meeting will be used to pick books for 2015.  So much time saved! 

I also really LOVED the idea of having the book club meetings in our homes.  That was our overall goal and since we were just starting, we limited them to coffee shops but now that we're a few months in, I think we're ready.  I think literary-themed dinners and decor is so much fun and I want to bring that to my club as well.  Delicious Reads has been going strong since 2011, so it's nice to be able to utilize some of their tips to help improve ours.

I am so excited to see where our club goes and to invite other members in the future.  If you're in the Great Falls, Montana area and are interested in being a part of our ladies book club, shoot me an e-mail :)

 

If you liked this post, share it with others! If you feel particularly moved by it, leave a comment because I love feedback and discussion. Social media links are provided below and thanks for reading!