Q&A with Cindy Hudson discussion

You may be tempted to do nothing to plan your book club discussions, thinking that conversation will snowball once you get it started. Besides, we're all busy and it's hard to set aside time to do this.

First I'll address the time issue. In as little as 10 to 20 minutes you can put together the structure for a lively conversation. If you involve your daughter, you get her perspective on what the girls will be interested in and you spend time talking about the book with her.

Second, I believe it's really important to start off with an idea of how you'll direct the conversation. While it's true that your talk may snowball and pick up on its own, you may not cover some of the most important topics raised in the book that way.

Also, when you have discussion questions in mind, you can also keep the conversation from straying too far into unrelated areas. Off topics may be fun, but you can save those for after you're done talking about the book.

In future posts, I'll talk about how you can come up with discussion questions, and how you can encourage everyone to participate. Please ask questions if you want to cover something specific.

When you're thinking about what questions to ask in your book club discussion, the first place you should always check for ideas is the author's website. Many authors are including discussion questions for their books online. Some are even offering questions specific to mother-daughter book clubs and activities to go along with the book.

It's easy to find out if an author has a website. Just search for her name on the internet, and she has a site, it will usually be one of the first listings in the search results. If you don't find discussion questions, you can look for an author bio that you may want to share at your meeting.

I pulled Sherman Alexie's bio off his website when my book club read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The story is fictionalized autobiography, and we were able to compare some the things we discovered Alexie had gone through in his own life with what he wrote for his character, Arnold. It kept a thread going through our conversation.

This is a great point, Cindy! Also, some authors have teacher's guides posted on their sites that would also be helpful to spark discussions.

Thanks Terry for pointing out that you can get great ideas from looking at teacher's guides too. Those guides are meant to spark meaningful discussion in a group setting.

I also do an Internet search for the terms "discussion guide" plus the name of the book. Searching this way sometimes turns up multiple sources, which means you can see multiple viewpoints about what to discuss. For instance, a search for "Holes discussion guide" turned up questions listed at Scholastic.com, Kidsreads.com, several teacher's guides, and a few libraries, including my own Multnomah County Library here in Portland.

If you're having difficulty finding a discussion guide online, you might ask a teacher, school librarian or public librarian if she's read the book and has ideas for topics to talk about.

Tomorrow I'll close off this monthlong Q and A with a list of generic questions that will work for most books in case your search turns up no suggestions for discussion.

Thanks Cindy for this interesting discussion and good information. We haven't yet joined a new mother daughter book club in our new city, but today I am off to the library with a list of titles from the books you reviewed on your website. I'll get some good books we can both read and talk about together! That would make us the world's smallest mother daughter book club! But seriously I miss reading with her now that we've moved. Take care and thanks again.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you can't find anything meaningful that will help you plan your book club discussion. That's more likely to be the case for older books that are not widely used in classrooms. I found that to be the case when my book club read "West with the Night," a memoir by Beryl Markham, who was the first woman to fly solo from Europe to North America. While not unknown, the book isn't new enough or popular enough to have online resources.

If you run into a similar situation, you can always fall back on a list of general discussion questions that work for most books. Tie that in to a bit of biographical information about the author and you're likely to create an interesting conversation.

While all of the questions below won't work for every book, you may want to check out this list for some that may work with the title you're reading:

Who was your favorite character? What did you appreciate about her?

What does the main character believe in? What is she willing to fight for?

What makes a minor character memorable?

Describe one of your favorite scenes. Why did you like it?

Are any of the events in the book relevant to your own life?

How could the main character acted differently to change any negative events that occurred?

What was your lasting impression of the book? Do you believe you will still remember it a year from now?

What else struck you as good or bad about the book?

Would you recommend this book to a friend?

Do you want to read more works by this author?

Ellen wrote: "Thanks Cindy for this interesting discussion and good information. We haven't yet joined a new mother daughter book club in our new city, but today I am off to the library with a list of titles fro..."

Ah Ellen, I wish you were still here reading with our club. Our selection this month is A Match Made in High School by Kristin Walker. Now that should make for a good discussion whether it's just the two of you or a full group. It's about a mock marriage where the kids in high school learn about some of the things other than love that make a marriage work. It's funny too.

I know what you mean about missing reading something together. When Catherine and I are between book club selections, I try to read something else with her, because I miss that shared experience for us to talk about. Otherwise, when we talk we're mostly telling each other about what happened during our days, but we're not getting into other life situations.