Q.. How many members do you have? What's the gender and age breakdown?
A. There are about 4 men and 8 women, ranging in age from 30's to late 60's.
 
Q. How often and where do you meet?
A: We meet once a month (except for August) at Wilkies (Ohio's oldest bookstore) in downtown Dayton.

Q. Do you eat at your meetings? 
A. Different people bring snacks: cheese and crackers or cookies.  At our old location we ordered lunches --- salads and sandwiches.

Q. Who leads the discussion? Do you use reading group guides?
A. We usually all just jump in and start talking.  We read the reading guides but rarely use them.
 
Q. What kind of books do you read?
A. Mostly literary types --- everything from Ahab's Wife by Sena J. Naslund to Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy.

Q. How do you choose your books? Do you choose one new book at each meeting, or do you choose the books for a number of meetings ahead of time?
A. We all make suggestions and then try to agree on one book.  We usually choose ahead 2-4 books.

Q. What were some of the best discussions or favorite books the group read?
A. Snow Falling on Cedars was a great discussion because we had a guest who had been in one of the Japanese internment camps in California.

Q. How do you keep things fun?
A. We know each other well enough to make jokes about reading preferences and likes and dislikes. 

Q. What advice would you give to other reading groups?
A. I'd suggest picking a favorite book to start with and start with a small group of people. We keep our group small so that we can choose the quality of books we are most interested in.

Q. Do you have any horror stories, amusing anecdotes, or other special tales to tell?
A. We have a local politician who writes poetry. He was at our meeting place doing a book signing, but his visitors had windled. He joined our group and the newspaper took pictures of us sitting around discussing "his" book.  Another time, we read a book by a local author and he joined us at our meeting when we discussed his book.

Q. Is there anything else unique or noteworthy about your group that you would like to share?
A. Our group is made up mostly English professors, teachers, or people with degrees in literature, so no matter what book we are discussing we are always comparing it to other books that we have read.