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Ooh, here’s a lovely idea to help while away the time until Halloween: Start a book club oriented around gothic books.<\/p>\nOoh, here’s a lovely idea to help while away the time until Halloween: Start a book club oriented around gothic books.<\/p>\n
A club can consist of local people who periodically meet to discuss a book, an online forum where members can post discussion and comments, or some combination of the two. A local group has the advantage of real-time conversation (which, for a small number of people, could also be done online with Skype), more incentive to actually read the latest book, a convivial atmosphere (with snacks!), and an excuse to get out of the house occasionally. An online club is great for geographically-diverse groups or for people with busy schedules who may not be able to carve out time to meet on a regular basis.<\/p>\n
Real Simple<\/a> and LitLovers<\/a> have some useful tips for organizing a book club in meatspace, and many of the suggestions (such as choosing a theme) are applicable for virtual clubs as well. For an online club, you’ll need a discussion tool: A blog (free at hosts like WordPress<\/a>), a forum (like ProBoards<\/a>), or a group (such as Yahoo Groups, Google Hangouts, or Facebook). Goodreads has a group<\/a> feature that’s oriented toward book discussion, and there’s a site called BooksterClub<\/a> which seems to specialize in online book clubs.<\/p>\n Once you’ve organized the club, it’s time to select books. You can either focus on a specific subgenre–for instance, Goth Shopaholic has 12 months’ worth<\/a> of suggestions for “Goth, Horror and Dark” biographies–or consider a theme like “Gothic” (vintage<\/a> or modern<\/a>), Classic Horror<\/a>, or the works of a particular author.<\/p>\n If you’ve regretted not setting aside more time for reading, joining a book club is great motivation. If it’s a gothic book club, well, so much the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ooh, here’s a lovely idea to help while away the time until Halloween: Start a book club oriented around gothic books. A club can consist of local people who periodically meet to discuss a book, an online forum where members can post discussion and comments, or some combination of the two. A local group has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24574"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24795,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24574\/revisions\/24795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}