Booksprouts another resource for starting or running a book club

Booksprouts: The Online Community for Book Clubs

The other day a friend drew my attention to this website called Booksprouts. Booksprouts' goal is to make book clubs a fun and easy experience for everyone.

Reading is an usually solitary experience but it doesn't always have to be. Sometimes it is nice to bring in other individuals. Talking about books can enhance your reading experience and tighten social contacts.

If you feel like sharing your reading experiences with people close to you, one way to do this is start a book club. Booksprouts recognizes that this can be difficult to do. Friends may live and work far apart, and it is hard to find the time when everyone in a group can meet. Booksprouts' solution to the problem of time and geography is to provide a forum for online book groups.

It is hard to organize a book group, and once you are organized it is hard to choose the books to read. Booksprouts say they make it easy to start a club, join a club, invite your friends, choose a book, and discuss. Booksprouts introduces Book Choices to help book clubs agree on what to read, they automatically create and organize online discussion spaces for each book, and they help clubs manage their member lists and their club meetings.

I looked at the Booksprouts website and found it very easy to understand and navigate. You can search for a book group to belong to by geography, subject, author, or title. You can start your own book group. You can find books by title, subject or author and you can see a list of current hot books. You could use the site just as a resource to find books to discuss in your existing group.

The site is still in Beta mode, so I did not see many reviews of the site. At least one public library is using it. The reviews I did see could not understand how the site will make money. I found the Booksprouts blog which gives a rationale of why they started the site. At the moment it is free to sign up to join or create a book group. Some groups are open and some are invitation only.

Some reviewers wondered why we need yet another book sharing site, mentioning LibraryThing, Shelfari, etc. You should check the site out for yourself. If you have been struggling with finding a suitable book group, online may be the way to go.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Last month in the Jarrettsville branch the Novel Ideas book group read and discussed Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Find this book in our catalog.

In this story the Rev. John Ames begins a letter to his young son. It is 1956 in a small Iowa town and Ames is 77 years old, in failing health, with a much younger wife and six-year-old son. He imagines his son reading the letter when he is older. In it is the story of his life and his forbears, but also, as a reviewer from Publishers Weekly wrote, "[in it] his meditations on creation and existence are fully illumined. Ames details the often harsh conditions of perishing Midwestern prairie towns, the Spanish influenza and two world wars. He relates the death of his first wife and child, and his long years alone attempting to live up to the legacy of his fiery grandfather, a man who saw visions of Christ and became a controversial figure in the Kansas abolitionist movement, and his own father's embittered pacifism. During the course of Ames's writing, he is confronted with one of his most difficult and long-simmering crises of personal resentment when John Ames Boughton (his namesake and son of his best friend) returns to his hometown, trailing with him the actions of a callous past and precarious future. In attempting to find a way to comprehend and forgive, Ames finds that he must face a final comprehension of self--as well as the worth of his life's reflections."

Discussion points:

The review said, "Robinson's prose is beautiful, shimmering and precise." Would you agree? Can you find examples?

Would you agree with this statement? "Despite the meditations on faith, even readers with no religious inclinations will be captivated."

"Many writers try to capture life's universals of strength, struggle, joy and forgiveness." Do you think Robinson has succeeded? Can you think of other writers who have succeeded also?

Reading Guide online:

Click here for a reading guide from ReadingGroupGuides, the online community for reading groups.

The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

Recently the Fallston Branch book group, Critics Without Credentials met and discussed The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls. Find this book in our catalog.

This astounding memoir has such a lot in it for a book group to get their teeth into. Here is what one reviewer in Publisher's Weekly 01/17/2005 wrote:
"Freelance writer Walls doesn't pull her punches. She opens her memoir by describing looking out the window of her taxi, wondering if she's "overdressed for the evening" and spotting her mother on the sidewalk, "rooting through a Dumpster." Walls's parents...were a matched pair of eccentrics, and raising four children didn't conventionalize either of them. Her father was a self-taught man, a would-be inventor who could stay longer at a poker table than at most jobs and had "a little bit of a drinking situation," as her mother put it." Since their parents remained willfully impoverished, "The Walls children learned to support themselves, eating out of trashcans at school or painting their skin so the holes in their pants didn't show... One by one, each child escaped to New York City. Still, it wasn't long before their parents appeared on their doorsteps. "Why not?" Mom said. "Being homeless is an adventure." "
Discussion points
Do you think Watts' parents' poverty was a choice? Is there anything to admire in their lifestyle?
What do you think about the children's self-sufficiency?
What do you think of Walls' mother's gift for rationalizing and making the best of things?
The PW review said Walls has a "fantastic storytelling knack." Would you agree?
What is the tone of the book?
Does Walls resent her parents? Was she glad when they turned up in New York?
Did the children gain or lose from their upbringing?
Do you believe Walls' story?
What do you think of the metaphor of the glass castle in the book's title?
Link to Reading Guide:
There is an excellent discussion guide for The Glass Castle on BookBrowse.com