books are supposed to be fun!

I re-started the book club at my office after the previous organizer retired. I thought, naively, that this would be something fun to do. It has actually proven to be more challenging than I anticipated.

My choices of books have been well received, for the most part. I get good, but sparse feedback from my colleagues that participate in book club on the books we choose. But, its the ones that don't come to book club, or read the books, that like to comment on my choices the most. "Why did you chose THAT one?" "But I've already read it." "Why don't you read this instead?" Oh, and the best are from the ones (or one, in my case) that send me longer than necessary e-mails containing questions and suggestions for the book club and insist that they are interested in the response. I say insist because they not only do not attend book club, they do not read the books.

But, not reading the book doesn't really seem to be that big a deal, anyhow. In our last meeting, there were four of us, including me, and only 2 of us, also including me, read the book. One person remarked that they didn't read it because they heard it was bad. Another gave it a shot, but didn't get past the first few pages. This made discussion a bit awkward. We couldn't talk about the book, because the two non-readers had mentioned that they would like to read it and did not want those that did to spoil the ending. We talked about the things mentioned in the summary on the back of the book. Not so bad. We meandered in and out of semi-related topics which made for a rather strange discussion. But, I was very happy that a few people showed up.

I'm hopeful, though. The best thing about starting from where we are is that it can only get better.