Verily: Book Clubs 2020

Are you in a book club or thinking about starting one? I was recently interviewed by the lifestyle magazine Verily about common book club misconceptions and BookBrowse's 2019 report, The Inner Lives of Book Clubs. Check out the article, which features insights and information on many book club topics.

Not just a "ladies' social club"

Davina Morgan-Witts is the founder and publisher of BookBrowse, a reader's guide for finding the best books. She's also an expert on all things book club. She's researched more than 20,000 readers over more than 15 years, and she has no time for the stereotype that book clubs only read "women's fiction" or snackable, easy-to-digest McBooks.

"This is an absolute fallacy. There's a widely held belief among readers not in one that book clubs are primarily social groups not interested in serious reading, but that perception is very far from the truth in most book clubs," she told me. "The vast majority of people taking part in book clubs do so because they want to learn from the books and from each other, and to be challenged to read books they otherwise wouldn't have chosen." She has the data to prove it: in her 2019 research report, The Inner Lives of Book Clubs, 71 percent of respondents said it was "very important or essential" to read books that stretched them as readers, and 91 percent wanted the chance to read books they wouldn't have picked up on their own....

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