Things I've Noticed: Picking a book for book club can be tricky

My problem with choices has always been finding some way to narrow them down – I’m not good with having dozens of choices, I like having three – do this, do that, or do something else.

I’m pretty sure that just a few days from now I’m going to have to have a selection for my book club’s April book. The problem is that I’m not entirely sure what I want to read. I could go for a comic book series (I did that with the Greg Rucka series Queen & Country a few months back) or perhaps a new genre book I’ve been looking forward (I did that with the then new Stephen King book Under the Dome last year), or maybe I could just randomly pick a book from the dozen boxes of old Fantasy/Horror/SF paperbacks I’ve got sitting in my basement.

I already have a pretty good idea of the books I’ll be reading for the month of March – I have a little song that reminds me of my seven categories, it goes;

Horror, SF, Fantasy

Book Club, Book Club, Jeeves and Me

Which represents my tactic of reading one book from each of my favourite genres, one book for both of my book clubs, the next in the Jeeves and Wooster series by P.G. Wodehouse (3 more to go and I’m finished) and finally one book that merely tickles my fancy.

The problem is I’ve read a lot of books over the years and most of what I’m reading these days falls into the “hard to find” category, a category you specifically do not want to use for a book club selection. So now I’ve got to think about which book I would like to read that is a) available in sufficient numbers at my local library, b) of interest to the members of the club (who range from being interested in Classic Lit and Non-Fiction to Archie Comics), and c) hopefully an overlap with one of my regular monthly books so that I can double up on some genre reading.

In the end I’m leaning towards either some dark fantasy (I’ve always meant to start reading Charles de Lint, and his earlier stuff was pretty dark) or maybe one of those Young Adult books I was going on about last week.

You know, being in a book club is trickier than you think.