Edible Books is an online book club. As your hosts, Natalie and Christina, are food lovers, we are encouraging books with a food theme running through them. That could include fiction or non-fiction–novels, biography, memoirs, essays, how-to books, you name it. Every month the club chooses a book to read, and the following month we read it. Just like a regular book club, except that you don’t have to clean the house before your friends arrive, there are members all over the world, and you can participate in your pajamas if you like – any time of day or night that you have a few minutes you can jump right into the discussion.
How does it work? It’s pretty simple.
Book Selection Process: Sometime around the middle of each month we’ll post a call for book nominations on this blog. Leave a comment on that post with your book suggestions. Feel free to lobby for your choice. We’ll give strong priority to food-related books, so If it’s not obvious where the food theme comes in, convince us. We’ll choose a handful of books from the nominations. We’re looking for variety, international flair, and just plain compelling reads.
The last week of the month, we’ll post the short list of book nominations for a vote. We’ll announce the winning book, post a discussion schedule, and the discussion begins on the first day of the month.
Discussion Schedule: Not everyone enjoys spoilers! So read at your own pace, but we’ll post a discussion schedule, breaking the book up into four parts, so that we can all talk about one section each week. You can jump back to talk about an earlier part of the book if something brilliant occurs to you, but try not to jump ahead and accidentally reveal who ate up all the cake in the locked library, causing your fellow book club members to groan and throw the book across the room.
How to join the discussion: The conversation primarily takes place on Twitter, although you can check the Edible Books blog and Facebook page for updates, book selections, book nominations and voting.
First, follow @ediblebookclub on Twitter.
Hashtags make it easy to organize conversations on any topic on twitter. Just add the hashtag #ediblebooks to your tweets, and the rest of the book club will be able to see it.
To read the discussion, search for the #ediblebooks hashtag and everyone’s tweets will be right there.
How to have a great conversation about the book: Jump in and share what you think! Do you like it or hate it–and most importantly, why? Thoughts about the plot? What about the characters? Do they remind you of anyone? Did you learn something new? Have an interpretation to share? Respond to each other’s comments. Debate and even disagree (respectfully, please!). Engage with each other. Most importantly, have fun.
