Book Club

As I mentioned on my site last year, I started getting involved with the local Bermuda library with some of their reading challenges. I mentioned the book bingo, but there have been others since then, one later in the year and another at the beginning of this year, which just finished. Apart from the reading challenges, I’ve also started attending more events at the library, including hosting one of my own events last September, which was an introduction to tabletop role-playing games.

One idea that was tossed around when I spoke with the folks at the library last year about my event was the possibility of hosting a book club of some kind. I mentioned that I had previously organized one at my office, but it didn’t last particularly long, and I wasn’t considering doing something like that. However, fast forward to this year, and I suppose my feelings on the matter have changed, as I decided to try to organize a book club.

Enter the Bermuda Triangle Society. It is a name I came up with when I was trying to think of a sufficiently geeky title for a speculative fiction book club based in Bermuda. And I thought, well, that would qualify given the Bermuda Triangle’s historical association with paranormal activity. And in my mind, the name just stuck. The bonus was that the domain name was also available, so, as I’m inclined to do, I set up a website and created all sorts of material for this hypothetical book club, which, at that moment, was just me.

The library was excited about my decision to start the club and has agreed to host the in-person aspects of the book club meetings, providing us with a place on the second Wednesday of every month in the evening to meet with anyone interested in speculative fiction.

Unlike traditional book clubs, where you might have a particular book assigned for everyone to read and discuss at the next meeting, this book club is more theme-based: each month, we will decide on a topic or theme. And people can choose books or stories that fit the theme, that are also within the realm of speculative fiction. So our first meetup was just this week, on March 11th, and the theme I presented in some of the posters and information I sent around was “Weird Jobs”. That encompasses anything that you could consider weird, whether that’s mundane jobs in fantastical environments like a vampire accountant or some unusual kind of fantastic job that someone might have in a regular, mundane environment or some mix thereof. It’s really open to interpretation, and that’s all part of the fun or challenge of the club, that there is no wrong answer to which book you read. Or even if you read one at all.

When we meet, we have everyone give a brief summary of the book that they read, along with how they feel it fits the theme. There’s no wrong answer per se, it’s just fun to hear people’s perspectives. It’s more of a chance to discuss the themes, books, and authors we like in general. In addition to the meetups, I’ve set up a mailing discussion group that lets interested members receive group emails and communicate between sessions. And if anyone is interested in joining that discussion group, even if they aren’t in Bermuda and can’t attend the in-person meetings, you are welcome to join the virtual discussions. With the caveat that there will likely be context you are missing.

One of my intentions for future meetings of the club is to bring a few general open-ended reading-related questions, either genre-specific or just reading habits in general, and use some of those to kick off some discussions. However, coming up with a list of those questions made me realize I have some pretty strong opinions about some of these things. It would be interesting to write some of those down and publish them here, so you may see a few reading and book-related posts popping up in the next little while.

My main takeaway so far from our first meetup is that, even with a fairly niche interest in speculative fiction, people are coming from a range of backgrounds and approaches to the genre. My perspective and background in terms of books, authors, and sub-genres are quite different from some of the other members’. And so it isn’t just a matter of we’re all reading the exact same things by the same people. It is a very broad genre umbrella. And so I’ll be able to broaden my horizons and, in turn, provide insight into some of my own interests that might otherwise go unnoticed by most people.