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 :)

 

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Literary Junkies: An Online Book Club Guest Post

Taylor, from Pink Heels Pink Truck, is visiting The Simplicity today to tell y'all about a great opportunity to join Literary Junkies.  It's an online book club that I found through a blogger and have met several other bloggers through this awesome opportunity.  If you're looking for ways to connect with other bloggers who love to read or want to join with your swap partner, read on!

Hi fellow book lovers!! I'm Taylor (Pink Heels Pink Truck), co-founder of the Literary Junkies Online Book Club. I'm excited to be here today to tell you all about our online book club!

As I said, I'm one of the co-founders of the Literary Junkies. My partner in crime in this awesomeness is Leslie (By the Porchlight). We both share a huge (like I mean, HUGE) love of books and we got to emailing/chatting back and forth one evening about our love of said books and well, it just turned into "why don't we start an online book club so other book lovers have a place too" and ta-da! The Literary Junkies was born. :)

We have over 50 members currently and are growing! Membership is easy peasy! Just click here, make a request to join our group and the doors will open to you. :) (Well, after we click the little approve button...but don't worry we let everyone in who asks...we just keep it private so we can personally welcome each one of you! Oh and to keep the spammy people out!)

The Literary Junkies meets monthly on Twitter on the 3rd Tuesday of the month under the hashtag #LiteraryJunkies. When we aren't partying it up on twitter, we mingle with each other on our facebook group page. We also host a monthly Literary Junkies link up that falls on the same 3rd Tuesday of the month. This fun linky is, you guessed it, all about books. :)

We are currently reading "Diamond in the Rough: A Memoir" by Shawn Colvin and will be chatting about her book on May 21st. Our next book for our June discussion is "Silver Linings Playbook" by Matthew Quick.

We've got some fun and extremely exciting things (well Leslie and I think so) coming up for all of our members and we would love to have more fellow book lovers join in, so if this sounds like it's your cup of tea...come join us!