In the last several months, since I started managing this lovely blog, I've had lots of great emails from all different kinds of book clubs; some large, some small, some where people are the same age and have similar backgrounds and some where everyone is very different. Then there are some that are open to new members or to the public and some that are not. And this got me thinking...

If you are open to new members or to the public you might get a bad apple or two.

What if you get someone who just doesn't fit?

I used to own an independent bookstore/coffee shop in the Atlanta area and we had several book clubs that were open to the public. I remember once a woman showed up carrying a library book and a cup of Starbucks and I thought...."Really??" I mean I didn't mind if someone didn't buy the book from me - but really? The blatant coffee cup from somewhere else? Mind you I was also giving away free wine and goodies! But I digress. This woman then proceeded to monopolize the conversation, interrupt people and be generally pretty loud and fairly negative. Of course as the store owner I had to remain diplomatic, but that didn't stop me from an eye roll or two shared with some of my regulars.

Luckily in our case, the woman in question must have realized she wasn't a fit because she didn't come back. But what do you do if your someone keeps coming back and keeps being annoying. And even worse, what if she's a friend of your friend?

I saw one solution in action at a local senior center where I was invited to come to lead one of their book club discussions. The organizer warned me in advance about "Betty" who they all seemed to feel was out of control. And in fact Betty was kind of a nutter. Her ideas were a little out of left field and she felt the need to play devil's advocate on every point. The other ladies handled her by literally ignoring what she said and continuing where the conversation had left off before she spoke. It was hilarious. With a capital "H". They weren't rude. They let her speak and then they basically just pooh-poohed her and went on.

It was kind of awesome and more importantly it worked. The other ladies had a lovely time, and really I think Betty was none the wiser.

Another solution for the bad apple (at least for me) is to have that second glass of wine. Things tend to bother me a lot less after that second glass. But that idea surely won't work for everyone.

Obviously another solution would be find some way to diplomatically ask the person to modify their behavior. I think the only way to pull that off is to ask everyone to stop doing something specific without naming names. Make sense? Of course your bad apple may not get the hint but maybe she will. Fingers crossed.

Have you had any experiences with bad book club apples? Have a unique solution? I'd love to hear it! Feel free to comment here - or email me at dana@bookreporter.com!

--Dana Barrett, Contributing Editor

In today's guest post Ingrid Jendrzejewski gives us an update on the 38 Plays in 38 Days Project and all the fun derivations people have come up with.

When I put the call out to see if there was anyone interested in reading all of Shakespeare's 38 plays in 38 days, I had no idea what kind of response I'd get. I thought that if I could find even one person who was interested in joining in, I'd consider myself lucky indeed.

The site went live in mid-February. Within less than two weeks, around 50 people had expressed their interest on the website, and even more had signed up to the Facebook group. Ages ranged from pre-teen to retirement age and I heard from people in at least eight different
countries.

I was astounded. After all, even though the project only lasts a little over five weeks, committing to reading a play a day is nothing to sneeze at!

Reading officially started on March 1st. Since then, the website has been getting over 100 unique visitors a day and there are roughly a dozen of us who communicate regularly through the forum, on Facebook or by e-mail. We have amongst our number a professional actress, a
literature major, a fellow on paternity leave, a special-effects designer, a sculptor, a writer and someone with "the most boring daytime job one could imagine". Several of these people blog
regularly about the plays, sharing opinions, thoughts, background, and tales of professional performance experience. In addition, I hear from someone completely new almost every day.

I'm not surprised that there are some quiet readers out there. If I weren't organising this, I may very well be one of them. For me, one of the most difficult parts of this project is balancing the actual reading with all the other things that need to be done. I seriously underestimated the time I'd need to set aside for administrative tasks like dealing with e-mails, updating the website and keeping the forum free from dodgy spammers. I am just about managing to get the plays
read, but I'm behind on writing, eating, sleeping, laundry and I'm sure my friends think I've been swallowed by the earth.

So, is it worth the madness? Absolutely.

Because we're reading the comedies and tragedies in roughly the order in which they were written, even us non-Shakespeare scholars have been able to catch a glimpse of how Shakespeare develops as a writer. Also, reading the plays in such close succession means that each new play is read with the previous plays fresh in mind. Connections between them leap off the page that never would have occurred to me had there been more of a gap between readings. Finally and foremost, I am getting so much out of reading other people's comments and blogs.
Being part of a diverse community of readers keeps the motivation high and I learn so much more had I been reading on my own.

By the end of the Ides of March ? 15 days into this whirlwind tour of Shakespeare's plays ? we'll have read roughly 340,000 words of Shakespeare. Keeping up is challenging, but not impossible. I'm finding that reading Shakespeare is a skill; it gets easier with
practice. After the first few days, one falls into a rhythm of reading. Personally, I've discovered that at the end of a long day, it is infinitely easier to return to a play than it is to start it. I
now make it a policy to read a bit in the morning ? even if it is just a prologue or one short scene.

Since the project started, some people contacted me to let me know that, even though they aren't going to read all 38 plays, they have made up their own Shakespeare challenges. For example, a commuter is listening to recordings of the plays on the way to work, one new
parent is watching each play on DVD, a couple people have committed to reading all the plays they haven't yet read and one young person is going to the theatre to see a Shakespeare play for the very first time.

I'm delighted by these alternative takes on the project and, of course, anyone and everyone who is interested in reading, watching, listening to or talking about Shakespeare is more than welcome to join in fun and conversation over the upcoming weeks.

--Ingrid (www.shicho.net/38)

Heather Johnson's book club recently discussed ALIAS GRACE by Margaret Atwood. It was a bit of the departure for the Storie Delle Sorelle book club, but one that worked. And the comfort food they shared sounds yummy to boot. Check it out. This one may be a good fit for your group!

My book club, Storie delle Sorelle, met in late February to discuss ALIAS GRACE, by Margaret Atwood. We’ve read both fiction and non-fiction before but this was our first fictionalized story based on actual events. None of us were sure what to expect. A novel about young maid who helps murderer her employers? In the 1800s? In the wilds of Canada? And she spends most of her life in prison? What, exactly, were we getting ourselves into?

To make things fun, our hostess suggested that we each bring a food that would make us feel better if we were in prison. Offerings included potato soup, cheesy bread, sausage/spinach bread, chocolate chip cookie pie, ice cream, and wine. Yeah, I’d say that would make for a nice prison meal!

We shouldn’t have worried about the book though – most of us loved it. Atwood was able to realistically speak in the voice of a 19th century woman, fully immersing us in the time period in a way that many authors cannot. The details of daily life were both fascinating and appalling to our modern sensibilities and they always felt authentic.

The story wasn’t really about the details of the murders themselves, as we worried it would be. Rather it was about the circumstances that allowed the murders to happen: class lines, gender issues, sexual repression, poverty. We appreciated the ways these problems were woven into the story rather than being presented as an overt lesson to the reader.

Toward the end of the meeting we discussed the few known facts about the real Grace Marks, the “murdering maid” of the story, and tried to figure out what might really have happened. Needless to say we didn’t come to any solid conclusions.

This book definitely gave my club a lot to talk about. The six of us really enjoyed reading it, much to our surprise. We found out later that two members who couldn’t make it to the meeting actually did not like the book. We’d have loved to have them there to compare notes with, but maybe at our next meeting we can get them to share their reasons ….

Next time we’ll be discussing THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett, so stay tuned!

--Heather Johnson, Storie Delle Sorelle Book Club

“Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.” -- W. H. Auden

Back by popular demand – It’s the Super Fab blog post on Super Fab Book Club Names. Thanks once again to all who emailed, facebooked (is that officially a word now?) and commented on the blog. Here is the round of great names and great groups for March:

Ladies of the Night - Junction City, Kansas
Cheryl Jorgensen says: Ladies of the Night is, of course, a group of ladies that meets once a month at night (at the library), and have been doing so since 2001. We read books about, by, and for women, and frequently look beyond the bestseller lists for thought provoking literature. We are a very enthusiastic group of eighteen. Not one of us is afraid to voice an opinion, and we love reading and discussing books that we probably would not even pick up if we were not in this group.

Read Between the Wines – Northern Suburbs of Chicago, Illinois
Kristen Eastman says: We are a group of 10 women from all walks of life and 4 different countries! (U. S., Mexico, Germany, and Sweden!) We have been meeting monthly for 7 years and read a variety of wonderful books. We meet on a weekend evening and share dinner. Occasionally, we venture to a restaurant or Ravinia.

The Novel Seeker's - Eureka, Missouri
Alene wrote in about her book club. She says: I have been in a book club for 6 years now and we call ourselves The Novel Seeker's . We started out with about 6 members but now we boast a whopping 15. We all go to the same church so we are a Christian based book club but the novels we read don't necessarily have to be Christian. We decided to call ourselves the Novels Seeker's because as Christian we should always be seekers of Jesus.

J.R. Monahan of Cherry Hill, NJ is in two book clubs and insisted on naming them – so she could keep it all straight. Both are great! Go J.R.

Women of Words + Wine
J.R. says “This group has been meeting monthly for about ten years. 'Words' could be used to describe either the book or our conversations; 'wine' is self-explanatory, except that we had a rather lengthy discussion on how to spell it: 'wine' or 'whine!' We have consistently had about 15 members and meet at different member's home each month. While we do eventually discuss the book, considerable time is spent chatting, laughing and drinking wine! “

Barclay Book Bags
J.R. explains: This group was created exactly three years ago with four former members of Women of Words + Wine. We all live in a neighborhood called "Barclay," thus the first part of the name. As for the second part, there is bit of a play on the word 'bag' in the sense that it could describing an actual book bag or referring to the members as “old bags!” Everyone loved the name when I presented it, so it got the nod! We meet on Fridays and routinely stay up way past our collective bedtimes!

Look for still more interesting, thought provoking and just plain entertaining names next month. Got a great name? Want a starring role in the next Super Fab Names post? Email me at: dana@bookreporter.com.

--Dana Barrett, Contributing Editor

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Monika Fagerholm, today's guest blogger and the author of The American Girl talks about how to read her new book. Is it a simple crime story? Yes and no. It is a human story and Monika explains why you shouldn't have to look for hidden meaning as much just experiencing the book.

The American Girl centers around an unsolved crime. A young girl from America, Eddie de Wire, drowns under mysterious circumstances in a lake in the countryside outside a big city; it is 1969, somewhere in the southern part of Finland. Even though the setting and the landscapes are real, it was important for me not to be specific with names and places, but to create a world of its own. I would like the reader to feel that the place, the landscapes and the events are his or her own. This is not a story about what happened in Finland some years ago, nor is it a traditional whodunit crime story. It’s about the universality that this could happen anywhere, that this might be happening to you, in your own landscape inside of you. Some kind of archaic thing; the places, the characters in the novel are figures from inside ourselves.

As a writer I detest mystification for mystification’s sake: I believe in absolute simplicity and in the concrete. Things, persons, events are speaking their own language, have their own rhythms, their own way of talking and talking to us. There is no narrator who moves us forward and gives us explanations, telling us what to think and how to feel about things. I wanted the experience to be somehow like going into the woods, taking a path and moving ahead. It is not strange nor difficult, in fact, difficulties may arise if you think too much or if you expect certain things—as we often do in an ordinary crime story. Trust me, things will open up along the way, just jump in. In the course of the story we will eventually learn more about what really happened to Eddie. We will get an answer to the question: Who Did It?

So in this way The American Girl can be read as crime fiction. But the main focus of the story does not lie in the solving of a crime, but what crime and death invoke in us, as human beings. How we are moved by it, changed by it, and also, how a whole place, a little rural setting on the outskirts of a big city, is forever transformed by it.

When I started writing this novel (the first book of a two-novel series), I had this idea that I wanted to write about and investigate how a crime (an unsolved, violent crime) turns into a story, into stories, clusters of stories, and finally, in the course of time, becomes a myth. And about the tremendous power of myths, which are both beautiful and frightening since myths also have a time span of their own: mythical time is a lot about the same things happening over and over again, patterns repeating themselves, playing the same tunes over and over (this is also a characteristic of the musicality in the text, in the form of different melodies, old folk songs and references to pop songs). The whole notion of time as something moving forward in a linear, rational way might be threatened by myths. As, of course, consequently is the whole concept of truth—myths can effectively blur the truth, make truth impossible to reach. How myth grows stronger than truth, becoming more real than reality, is a question I had in mind when I started writing these books. These questions are relevant for the times we are living in today with virtual realities, with news turning into storytelling (based on old mythical patterns).

The story is set mainly in the seventies. Music also plays a crucial role in the book. There are different tones in the text, there are also a lot of invented words, invented slang and such, and references to real music, old folk songs, and pop songs. Although the latter are not there to invoke nostalgia and place the narrative in a particular context. The reader will note twists in the lines and wrong interpretations of certain well-known songs and musicians (there are also invented songs and musicians). For instance, the lyrics are not cited correctly, some phrases keep changing, certain melodies keep returning, etc. These twists have a certain meaning. Because this is the way we take in certain songs, make them ours, brace them to our hearts, our bodies. This the way music lives in us: we put something personal in. To have music inside of you, to live with music, it’s not about citing something correctly. And in this same way, these girls (and the other characters in the book) also take the destiny of the American girl into themselves. And the stories that emerge from that, other stories, other destinies, emerge and create new stories, new meanings.

After all of this, how should one read The American Girl? Go into it, as if you were going into a landscape. There are no hidden meanings, everything is there, in the lines.

-- Monika Fagerholm, Author

In today's guest post, S.J. Parris, the author of Heresy talks about where in history she found her main character, how she was able to re-create him by adding her imagination to the facts and why she has grown so attached.

Whenever I’ve been involved in book groups, I’ve noticed that the books we’ve had the most fun discussing have been those that divided people’s opinions, or at least worked up a bit of debate. It’s great if everyone’s enjoyed a book (and that’s certainly the author’s hope!) but as a reader it’s always livelier if you find yourself defending a character or incident against someone else’s very different interpretation of it.

As an author, you grow very close to your characters over the course of writing a book, and naturally you hope that your readers will grow to share some of that affection; it’s hard to take much interest in the outcome of a story if you haven’t grown to care about the protagonists. I was fortunate enough to find a great character in the history books, which made my job much easier: all I had to do was reinvent him as a hero that modern readers would find sympathetic.

I first encountered Giordano Bruno, the central character of my novel Heresy, when I was studying the Tudor age at university. I thought at the time what a fantastic character he would make for a novel, given his rich and varied life: Bruno was a Dominican friar whose appetite for unorthodox ideas meant he had to flee his monastery and become a fugitive from the Roman Inquisition. His own writings and contemporary accounts of him suggest he was witty, charismatic, stubborn and often difficult, but that everyone wanted him at their dinner table for his brilliant conversation and daring ideas. He must have been quite some talker; in five years he went from fugitive heretic to personal philosopher to the king of France. There is some speculation among historians that while he lived in England, he worked as a spy for Elizabeth I’s government, and this theory gave me the springboard I needed to create a series of stories around him.

The real-life Bruno seemed to have equal talent for making powerful friends and enemies, and I wanted my character to reflect this. But I also wanted to show his more reflective side and give a glimpse into how vulnerable he feels at times. Bruno lives in exile, unable to return to his own country because his original and unusual ideas (he believed that the universe was infinite, and dabbled in ancient Egyptian magic) would earn him a death sentence from the Holy Office. He is desperately ambitious for his ideas, but as a foreigner, without a family name, land or title of his own, his very existence is a precarious balance, always dependent on his wit and personality to attract a powerful patron who will support and protect him.

Being a spy also necessarily presents Bruno with a moral dilemma: for his own survival, and indeed the good of the Queen and the Protestant faith, he is obliged to deceive the people around him in order to find out what he needs to know. But his own conscience struggles with this when it comes to betraying the trust of individuals. Ruthlessness does not come easily to him, since he knows better than anyone that matters of faith are never black and white.

Another consequence of Bruno’s precarious status is the impossibility of forming lasting relationships with women. Almost nothing is known of the real Bruno’s personal relationships, so I was free to invent anything I wanted. Sophia Underhill is a fictional creation, though at the time the story is set, Oxford did appoint its first married head of a college, so it’s not entirely impossible for the Rector to be living there with his family. In Elizabethan times, very few women were educated to a high degree, and then only the daughters of the nobility—universities were strictly for the boys—so I have stretched the imagination a little in making Sophia as well-read as she is. But I could not imagine Bruno really falling for any woman who was not his equal in intelligence, and Sophia presents him with another dilemma—he knows that he has no means to marry her, so by rights he should not even attempt to pursue any relationship with her.

Usually when I finish a book I feel rather sad to leave behind characters I have spent most of my time with for the best part of a year, so the really great thing about writing a series of novels is that I don’t have to say goodbye to Bruno just yet. I felt I’d grown to know him better over the course of Heresy, and I’m looking forward to taking him through his next adventure. I hope readers will feel the same.

--S.J.Parris - www.heresybook.com