This is not a “how to” on running a book club. In fact I know next to nothing about book clubs and to run my first meet I googled what it takes to run such a thing. All of my previous stereotypes of book clubs were of bunch of super-boring people sitting in a circle and silently sipping tea (not coffee). After reading few articles I realized that I still know nothing about book clubs as apparently they could be run in myriad of different ways.

If you follow my blog you would notice that book reviews are one of very common blog posts here (55 of them), probably as common as technical blog posts and posts on success for software engineers. So no wonder I’m interested in reading and discussing books. One other aspect I’ve always been keen on is knowledge sharing. I used to share my knowledge via tech talks based on books and discussions called “design sessions”. It is not that I didn’t want to discuss books directly, but issue was that my audience in majority of cases didn’t read the book and still was interested in a given topic.

Last week I found myself in a situation when probably half of my team has already read or is reading one particular book. With a hint from my colleague, I kicked-off a book club. First meeting turned out to be a really great, fast paced discussion with a lots of engagement. I wasn’t the most active participant and this is awesome. Took notes and spoke only few times.

We went through highlights people remembered from the first chapter and then tried to analyze those, thought of practical applications, shared our related past experiences, and just had a good discussion. I would even call this to be some kind of a team building event – all virtual (in case you are reading this in future and COVID-19 is a thing of the past).

Once in 2012 I tried to organize “Code & Beer” and miserably failed with two people showing up. Arguably I just didn’t make it very clear I bought the beer for everyone :) This time people joined with no snacks but with tons of interest. So, how to run a book club? Who knows… Maybe make sure you have a “critical mass” of people interested in same book.