I finally figured out why my book club debates were going nowhere

Last month at our meeting in Portland, I realized every debate we had was just people stating their opinion and nobody changing their mind. What tipped me off was when Sarah said she hated The Great Gatsby because "the characters are all terrible" and then nobody asked her why that mattered. I started reading about Socratic questioning techniques for group discussions and now I prep 3-4 open-ended questions before each meeting that force people to explain their reasoning instead of just ranking books. Has anyone else found a specific method that actually gets people to engage with a book instead of just arguing about it?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancy4751mo ago

My book club had the same problem until we switched to a "no judgement" rule for the first 30 minutes. Like, you can't say if you liked or hated the book until you've talked about what the author was trying to do. Found that trick in some old library journal article. Made people actually look at the themes and metaphors instead of just getting defensive about their taste. Now we get into some wild discussions about stuff like the green light in Gatsby meaning different things to different people. Still gets heated sometimes but at least we're talking about the actual book now.

kim6931mo ago

Honestly, is analyzing a book really that deep for a book club?

nancy4751mo ago

Sometimes book clubs skip past the heavier stuff because they're scared of sounding pretentious, but that's where the real fun is. Once you get past the surface level plot points, you start seeing how the author stitched everything together with little details that hit different for everyone. It's like finding hidden layers in a song you've heard a hundred times, suddenly the whole thing makes more sense.