Can we talk about how we pick books for the club?

Our group in Austin was stuck for weeks because we all wanted different genres. I suggested we each pitch a book with a one-sentence 'sell' and then vote blind, no titles shown. We did it last Tuesday and picked a sci-fi book I'd never have chosen, but I'm 50 pages in and it's great. The blind vote stopped people from just picking the same author or judging by the cover. Has your club tried a method like this to get past the usual arguments?

2 comments

2 Comments

west.claire1mo ago

What if you also blind voted on a genre first? Like, we got stuck once because half wanted true crime and half wanted romance. So we all wrote a genre on a slip, picked one from a bowl, and then only pitched books from that category. It forced us out of our comfort zones but within a shared lane, so the arguments about 'what kind of book' were over before we even saw titles. We ended up with a historical mystery, which was a cool middle ground.

robert2481mo ago

Yeah, the "shared lane" thing is key. We do something similar but with three genre slips each, then draw two to combine. Forces way more creativity than just one. Last month we got sci-fi and cookbook, which was... interesting.