Tonight was our book club night and it was fabulously full of great conversation and of course, snacks! I thought it was very successful. It was also a whole bunch of fun! I came up with a couple of key things I noticed were prevalent in our book club night:
1. The story can pre-direct conversation. Some stories are more likely to spark an interesting conversation full of diverse thoughts, ideas, opinions and even interpretations of the story. While other stories may be more controversial, or have a certain connotation to them that cause people to be on the same page for main ideas. For example: The Catbird Seat by J. Thurber ended up having a huge amount of diversity in how people interpreted from screwball comedy, to dark humor, to very dark American Psycho. It was absolutely fascinating to listen and hear how one story was interpreted. On the other hand the story "Beautiful People" by C. Beaumont had this idea of conformity and conformity is bad. Already people are on the same page that the society portrayed in the story is hair-brain and wrong. That we all would be the rebel of the story. It doesn't allow for such a wide range of interpretation in some ways.
2. Future Fascination. All of us ended up picking stories that for the most part dealt with the far beyond future, rapid change, or the need for a new beginning. I thought it was pretty incredible that we all gravitated towards stories with this theme. I wonder if part of it is our own subconcious wondering what the future holds for our own lives and profession but also what both will look like retrospectively from future generations. Or maybe we are interested in the unknown and freshness of it all.
3. Facilitator self-conflict. One thing that I struggled with was, when do you as the facilitator chime in with your own thoughts and interpretation and when do you just hang back. As a librarian, you're suppose to create and support an environment for your book clubbers that allows for open discussion. Are you then apart of the book club too? Or are you just there to keep things on track? Where is that line and how strong of a line is it?
Overall, it was a fabulous night. I want to thank my book club members for making it a blast, and for the thoughtful conversation! I hope all of yours went splendidly as well!
I also struggled with the issue of facilitator self-conflict. I made a concerted effort to remain neutral because I feel that that is the traditional job of the facilitator, but in my feedback, people recommended that I add more to the conversation. My concern was that if I added an opinion, it would privilege that opinion because it comes from the facilitator. On the other hand, this is not anything so weighty as a court case, and we all know that we are free to disagree. It is certainly an interesting question.
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