We call
Fridays here at Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers Book Club Friday, but we’ve
never had an author blog about book clubs. Today I’m thrilled to welcome back
author Camille Minichino to rectify that.
Camille has
published seventeen mysteries in three series: The Periodic Table Mysteries,
The Miniature Mysteries (as Margaret Grace) and the Professor Sophie Knowles
Mysteries (as Ada Madison). She's written articles for popular magazines and
teaches writing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Camille is past president of
NorCal Mystery Writers of America, NorCal Sisters in Crime, and the California
Writers Club. She works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and teaches
science at Golden Gate U., San Francisco. Read more about her and her books at
her website.
Camille’s
latest book is A Function of Murder, a professor Sophie Knowles Mystery, and she’s offering a copy to one
of our readers who leaves a comment. -- AP
I Heart
Book Clubs
I'll start with a confession: I never met a book club
I didn't like.
Right now, I'm facilitating three of them. One is a
nonfiction group that has been meeting for twenty-two years. This month we're
reading The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What
Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, a new book by
Kevin Dutton. (Take the quiz. You may be one. Scary!) The second club is a
relatively new mystery group at an indie bookstore; the third (pictured above)
is a library mystery group that has been meeting for sixteen years. Some of
them agreed to pose tonight just so you could see them at work! You can tell
who are the shy ones.
I thought I might do a little how-to, as if
facilitating book clubs is a craft, like beading or making mop dolls! Here's
how I do it:
1. At the first meeting, collect data on who likes
what and choose the books for a few months ahead, making sure everyone has a
say in some way. In succeeding months, be egalitarian in author gender,
subgenre, setting, and any other group preferences.
2. Set out ranking rules. We use a scale from 1 to
10, where 10 is "best book I've read since Poe's Telltale Heart, and 1 means "I threw it across the room."
In the middle is "I would (or would not) recommend it." Ranking is
based on 3 factors: Characters, Plot, Writing. A book can get a 10 on character
and 2 on plot, or 7 on plot and 1 on writing, and so on.
3. At the beginning of each meeting, each member
gives a ranking with a one liner: "I rated this a 10 in all categories
because I didn't yawn once while reading it." This gives everyone, even
the shyest, a chance to express an opinion before things get out of hand.
4. Discussion proceeds. I usually start with those
who ranked the book the farthest off the average. "How come everyone gave
this book a 2, Oscar, and you gave it a 10?" or "Anastasia, you're
the only one who claimed to have taken a match to the book and gave it a 1. How
come?"
5. The facilitator needs to be prepared:
• with
questions that encourage discussion
• with
familiarity of the author's work to give the current book context
• with insights
that get people talking about deeper issues in the book
• with specific
passages marked as examples, in support of her/his own opinion or those of
others.
Some book clubs fall into disrepair when the talk is
80% social; others prefer it that way. I prefer clubs where the discussion is
about the book of the month first, chatting about shoes and kids a very distant
second (okay, you caught us going out for ice cream, but that was after
the meeting).
I spent
many years of my life doing physics and math (a la Professor Sophie Knowles) –
very social careers. No one does science out of her garage any more; it's a
team endeavor. My concern when I turned to writing was that it was too solitary
a profession and I'd never last. I'm so glad to have been wrong!
Book Clubs are a great way to share what I've read,
to meet and bring together others who love to read and are eager to talk about
why. Often I've given a book a 5 to start with and changed to an 8 after
hearing from the group about things I missed.
Between critique groups (couldn't do without them),
writers' organizations (ditto), conferences, and book clubs, I have
enough interaction to last through the days when it's just me and Word 2011 for
the Mac, and, of course, the whole crew in the Professor Sophie Knowles
Mysteries.
I'd love to hear about your experiences with Book
Clubs. If you leave a comment, you'll be entered into a drawing for a copy of
my latest release, A Function of Murder.
Dr. Sophie Knowles is a
math professor with a knack for creating complex puzzles that delight her
students. But now, at the close of the academic year, she must solve a crime
that doesn’t quite add up…
At the math department’s graduation party, Sophie hears heated
arguments coming from the graduates about Mayor Graves, the commencement
speaker. Not the mayor’s biggest fan, Sophie is happy to escape the drama with
an after-hours campus stroll accompanied by her helicopter-piloting boyfriend,
Bruce Granville. However, their date is interrupted by the mayor himself—with a
knife in his back.
As it turns out, the knife is
actually a Henley College letter opener—something that is gifted to every
member of the graduating class. Sophie is led to a complicated puzzle of
scandal and corruption, and it seems that Mayor Graves is at the apex of it
all. When Sophie finds out that the mayor was seeking her help on the day he
was murdered, she must use her top-notch logic to crack the puzzle and catch
the killer running free on campus…
Thanks for
joining us today, Camille. I wish I lived close enough to attend one of your
book clubs. Readers, leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of A Function
of Murder, and don’t forget to include an email address or
check back on Sunday to see if you’re the winner. We have a lot of giveaways
going unclaimed because we have no way of contacting the winners. -- AP
