How to Choose Your Book Club's Next Read: A Consensus Checklist

The plates are cleared, the wine is finished, and someone says the words that end every good book club evening: “So, what are we reading next?” Then comes the silence. Or the five-way argument. Choosing the next book is the part of book club nobody warns you about, and it can swallow a whole meeting if you let it.

It doesn’t have to. What follows is a checklist you can work through in one sitting, whether your group is three friends round a kitchen table or a dozen people in a hired room.

Agree the brief before you argue about titles

Before anyone names a book, spend two minutes deciding what sort of book you’re after. This sounds obvious, and almost nobody does it.

Ask three questions. Fiction or non-fiction this month? How long is realistic? Is there a theme we’re building on? A group that reads 300-page paperbacks will struggle with a 900-page doorstop, however brilliant it is. If you’ve been circling a country, a decade or an adaptation heading for the screen, say so now.

A brief does two jobs. It narrows twenty suggestions down to five, and it gives everyone a polite way to say no. “That sounds great, but it’s 700 pages and we agreed something shorter this time. Save it for the spring.”

Where good suggestions actually come from

Each other’s shelves

Ask every member to bring one book they’ve loved in the past two years that nobody else in the group has read. You’ll get a shortlist with the group’s personality already baked in.

What has worked before

If your best discussions came from a memoir and a thriller, that’s useful information. Look back over the last six months and notice which books produced twenty minutes of chat and which produced an hour.

The season you’re in

Short, dark evenings suit a gothic mystery. Summer suits something looser and faster. Matching the book to the month is a small trick that gets more people to the final page.

Prize lists and bookshop tables

Shortlists and staff recommendations are useful starting points because the description is already written for you. Just don’t let a list do all the thinking. The right choice for your group may be a book that never got near an award.

The consensus checklist

Run each shortlisted title through these questions. Any book that fails two or three of them can probably wait.

• Can everyone get a copy? Check the library, the ebook, the audiobook and the second-hand sites before you commit. It’s dispiriting to arrive at a meeting and find that four people never found the book at all.
• Does the length fit the month? Count the pages against the weeks. December and August are not the months for a thousand-page epic unless everyone says so cheerfully.
• Does it need a heads-up? Grief, violence, abuse, addiction: a one-line warning lets people decide for themselves rather than being ambushed on page forty.
• Will it start a conversation? The best book club books aren’t always the best books. An unreliable narrator, a moral dilemma or an ending people genuinely disagree about will fill an evening. A flawless, lovely novel can leave you with twenty minutes of “yes, I liked it too”.
• Does it stretch someone? A group that only reads its comfort genre slowly goes quiet. Aim for one book in four that at least one member had to be persuaded into.
• Is someone enthusiastic? A member who has already read it and wants to talk about it is worth more than any amount of research.
• Is it accessible? Large print, audio, a decent translation, a version that works on a phone. Ask before you assume.

How to decide without a two-hour debate

Once you have three books that pass the checklist, stop talking and vote.

Dot voting

Give everyone three votes to spend on the shortlist. They can put all three on one title or spread them around. Count the dots. It takes four minutes and produces a result nobody can argue with, because they drew it up themselves.

The rotating chooser

Some months the group simply cannot agree, and that’s fine. Every third or fourth month, hand the decision to one member. They choose within the brief, everyone reads it, no committee required. Groups that do this spend far less energy on admin and far more on the book.

Read both

If the group is split cleanly down the middle between two titles and both passed the checklist, don’t force a winner. Two short books can make a better month than one long one.

Common sticking points

The member who suggests the same genre every time. Rotate who sets the brief, not just who chooses the book. One month it’s crime, the next translated fiction, the next a memoir.

The book nobody finishes. Agree early that finishing isn’t the price of entry. A discussion works perfectly well when half the group stopped at chapter twelve; just ask everyone to say how far they got.

The worthy doorstop. If the group wants to tackle a big classic, pair it with something slight and give it two months. Ambition plus company beats ambition alone.

The book someone hated. That’s a good meeting waiting to happen, provided the criticism stays with the book and not with the person who suggested it. Say that out loud once and it usually holds.

The five-minute version

If you remember nothing else: agree a brief, gather suggestions, cap the shortlist at three, check the copies are gettable, then dot-vote. Write the next four months on a single page, and leave one month deliberately blank for whatever the group is talking about at the time.

The point of all this isn’t the perfect book. It’s getting the choosing out of the way so you can spend the evening on the reading, the arguing and the tea. Pick something, read it, and turn up ready to disagree.

Photo: congerdesign / Pixabay