The Book Club Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the Reading Group Experience

This book is a magnificent addition to our book club! Reading through it I found many great ideas to implement into our group. I love the recommended reading with the reviews, and the recipes. I was especally thrilled with the ideas on how to turn the book club meetings into events that everyone really looks forward to.
I started using the book right away and it comes along now to every meeting! If you have a book group, this is a must have!

I bought this book a few years ago while browsing for book group picks at my local book store. I have to say, it has become a great source for suggestions for my book groups. While I may not actually use the grups for the meetings, a group meeting in members' homes might really wear this one out--with its recipes and themed meetings, and even tips about pet behavior!
I often just pick this one up when I need something to read myself. Indispensible.

I love books about books. I love books about book clubs. Fiction, or non-fiction. Diana got everything perfect in this Book Club Companion. I've been in a book club for 5 years. She addresses everything we've encountered except what to do when my birds want to sing through our discussion! I could not put this book down. The book reviews/suggestions are very helpful. I know this because my group has done many of the suggested titles and I have read even more of them on my own. Her handling of book group problems is candid and gracious. The questions she asked the authors were more unusual than most. Her scrapbook/keepsake suggestions are the only things at which I truly excel ~ I've been keeping a scrapbook since my group began and have just started a 2nd one because the 1st one popped its binding! What is really wonderful about this book is that I will never forget a title I'm interested in reading; all I have to do is pick this up. Thank you, Diana! I look forward to meeting you when you come to my library!

This informative and interesting book is a great guide to many different books that most book clubs will love, especially if they have eclectic tastes. It also includes an amusing feature that lists what books were popular in book clubs in various decades past. Many books are profiled very well, and some are books that have recently come back into print.

When I thumbed through this book, I discovered that many of the suggested titles were among my favorites. So I have been reading a number of books from Loevy's lists, some familiar and some unfamiliar, and I have grown to trust her suggestions. Although I belong to a book club, I am less interested in the recipes and some of the articles about book club etiquette, such as whether to have pets present at meetings or not. The entry on pros and cons of knitting during discussion brought chuckles from the knitters in my book club. They did agree that if a famous author were one of our guests, the knitting would stop!