Calling All Book Clubs
By
As a new member of the community, I am interested in getting to know others through book clubs, and know there are others in the area also who share this interest. While researching book clubs, I discovered that the Rapid City Public Library offers a variety of services to those involved in book clubs.
If you are interested in starting a book club, the library provides links to guides to starting your own book club on our website, and we have various titles in our collection that provide advice on starting a club. To begin, you will have to make some important decisions when forming a book club such as who will attend and who will lead the discussion. When you have that decided, head on over to rapidcitylibrary.org and we’ll help you out.
Once you determine the intended audience to attend your book club, you will want to decide what to read. The Rapid City Public Library offers May We Suggest online newsletters in an array of topics including fiction, nonfiction, mystery, romance, and many more. We’re taking this service in a new electronic direction, where you can view newsletters on our website, sign up for an e-mail version of our newsletter, or even subscribe to an RSS feed.
You can also use your Rapid City Public Library card to log onto NoveList via our website. NoveList is a resource that provides readers with the opportunity to search for fiction titles. If your book club really enjoyed a particular fiction book, you can find that title in NoveList and click on a link to find similar books.” If you just want to browse some lists of award winning books, the Rapid City Public Library website offers that as well.
The library provides collections of books along with discussion topics and information. These “Books to Go” collections can be checked out for an extended period of six weeks. For a list of available titles, please visit the May We Suggest page of our website.
If having all members of the group
read the same title does not appeal to you, your group could consider having a
general theme for the book club; this gives members the opportunity to hear
about books they may not have read otherwise. For example, your theme could be “books about
Finally, you will want to determine where your book club should meet. Did you know that the library has meeting rooms that your book club can reserve by simply going to our website? You can easily reserve a meeting room by going to the “How Do I…” menu on the Rapid City Public Library homepage and scrolling down to the “reserve a meeting room” selection.
If you ultimately do not have time to form a book club, but you still want to be a part of one, you can join an online book club. The Friends of the Library sponsor an Online Book Club service you can sign up for by going through our website. It’s a novel approach to book clubs; you can have a brief portion of a book e-mailed to you on a daily basis until you have read up to 3 chapters of the book. If you decide you want to read the rest of the book, you can check the book out from the Rapid City Public Library. This free service offers many different genres to choose from such as romance, horror, mystery, science fiction, and good news books, as well as audio book titles.
If you have additional ideas, questions, or success stories regarding book clubs, please contact me at mbrekke@rcplib.org, or call 605-394-6139 ext. 238. I look forward to communicating with you. Until then, happy reading! Remember, you can find this information and more by going to rapidcitylibrary.org.