Cati Arcuri belongs to “The Pikes Peak Readers” in Colorado Springs, CO, which she describes as a group of “eclectic” individuals with varied tastes in genres. In this interview, Cati explains how a rotating schedule gives each member the opportunity to choose a book and lead a discussion while providing the club with a diverse selection of titles. With several writers as members, the group closely monitors newly-published works as well as nearby events and seminars. She also shares an interesting anecdote about how religious background factored into some of their discussions.

Q: Does your group have a name and/or a theme? How long has your group been in existence?

A: I call our group “The Pikes Peak Readers.” We don’t have a theme at all, unless eclectic is a theme. We’ve been meeting, reading and talking together since December 2005, so almost two years. It’s been really great.

Q: How many members do you have? How many men, how many women? What age are most of your members?

A: We have about 8-10 regular members and several others who want to know what we’re reading so they can read it too but don’t have much time to make it to meetings.

We had a token male in our group for several months and it was great having his perspective. It’s interesting how different a man’s view of what he reads is from a woman’s view. He moved away, sadly, and we haven’t been able to find any other men who want to join us. So, we’re just a group of women.

Our ages range from 30-60+.

Q: How often do you meet? Where do you meet?

A: We meet the second Monday of every month. We do a rotating schedule so that everyone has a chance to select a book to read and whoever selects the book gets to decide where we meet. We usually meet at that person’s house, but occasionally we’ll meet at Panera Bread Company.

Q: Do you eat at your meetings? What do you eat? Who brings the food?

A: If we meet at someone’s house, they usually host and provide dinner. We’ve tried to do theme food, but not all the books we read involve food or a specific location in order to choose a theme. If we meet at Panera Bread, it’s “fend for yourself.”

Q: Who leads the discussion? Do you use reading group guides?

A: Typically the person who chose the book will lead the discussion. Occasionally the person who chose the book can’t make it to the meeting, so Cati, the woman who started the group, will lead the discussion. She’s the one who organizes everything. She gets the discussion questions and book information ready for every meeting, so she’s good about knowing how to start off the discussion. We do use reading group guides quite often.

Q: What kind of books do you read?

A: We’ll read pretty much anything. We have an eclectic mix of women who have very different tastes in reading. It keeps things interesting and it gives the rest of us an opportunity to read some good books that we might not have otherwise read. Here’s a list of what we’ve read to date: Prodigal Summer, Wicked, The Da Vinci Code, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Namesake, The Last Time They Met, The Three Junes, Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons, Eat Pray Love, The Kite Runner, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Under the Banner of Heaven, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, The Secret Life of Bees, Ava’s Man, The Little Prince and Zorro.

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 typically choose one new book at each meeting. We have a rotating schedule so that everyone has a chance to choose something and lead the discussion.

Every October the Pikes Peak Library District has an All Pikes Peak Reads, where the library chooses a book and tries to get the community to read it and form discussion groups. So we try to do that each October. This year the library chose Zorro by Isabel Allende. We just had our discussion last week and chose the book we’ll be reading for November.

We thought about just having a list of books to read through, but it keeps it more interesting when we don’t know too far in advance what we’ll be reading.

Q: What were some of the best discussions or favorite books the group read?

A: Some of the best discussions we’ve had have been about books with controversial topics. The Da Vinci Code discussion was really interesting because we have several Catholics and other Christians in the group as well as a Buddhist. The discussion never became heated or caustic, it was just really interesting to see the different points of view on all the religious intricacies of that book.

Another great discussion we had was for Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer. It’s a true account of a pair of brothers who are fanatical Mormon fundamentalists who killed the wife and child of one of the brothers and used their faith as justification. The book goes into great detail about the Mormon religion and the difference between the mainstream believers and the extreme fundamentalists. I guess we like talking about religion in our group because this was another great discussion.

Q: How do you keep things fun?

A: By allowing a new person to pick the book each month, it keeps things interesting because we’re not reading the same genre two months in a row. We also get to meet in a new environment each month and learn something new about the other members of our group.

Several of the women in our group are very fond of reading and will read several other books throughout the month. We also have several writers in the group. So we all seem to be keeping up on new books that come out and events that are of interest to our members, like writing seminars, etc. We keep in touch throughout the month and will meet up for different events.

We’ve also read several books that have been turned into movies. We plan movie outings, too, as a group. We try to read the book first and then see the movie. After the movie we go to a coffee house or restaurant near the theater and talk about the differences between the book and the movie.

Q: What advice would you give to other reading groups?

A: Get a core group of people that you know will stick with it and try to come to every meeting and actually read the books.

Definitely come up with a system for choosing books and discussion leaders that works best for your group. Any organization you can implement will make the group more successful.

Use your local library as a source for information and ideas. A lot of libraries provide reading group sets for books you want to read, so you can check out the whole set of the same book so people don’t have to buy it or figure out how to get it on their own.

Q: Is there anything else unique or noteworthy about your group that you would like to share?

A: The group started out as mostly women related to each other because we all share a love of books. Since we’ve been around a while, we’ve evolved into the core family with several really close friends who are diligent, too. It’s brought us all much closer together, and we know we’ll be around for a long time.

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