The recent announcement of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth being given the O’Connor award for outstanding short story collection (see my post) made me wonder if this book would be a good pick for our neighborhood discussion group.
The book groups I’ve participated in have never successfully discussed a short story collection, or, for that matter, any collection of essays. We tried Anna Quindlen’s Loud and Clear; it was a struggle to discuss because there were so many topics included in this well-regarded book.
Random House offers a Reader’s Guide for Unaccustomed Earth. This is a good starting point, but my feeling is that even this list of questions would have to be whittled down to a manageable handful prior to any book group meeting, to give participants the opportunity to better prepare.
I’m very interested in how this is done. There’s an entire genre that my group has been avoiding because we haven’t had a good “flow” with this type of book in the past!
Has your group found a comfortable way to handle mutiple stories? Do you each select one to lead a short discussion of? Do you use the democratic process, everyone gets to vote for 3 and the top five get the floor? Does the hostess select a handful to analyze, compare and contrast?
Do you have any suggestions for successfully discussion short stories collections in a book group setting?
[...] 16, 2008 by Dawn Earlier I wrote a post about short stories and the challenges my book group has had when we’ve attempted to discuss [...]
I would like to know too. Our book group tried twice.
And it was a short lived evening. One was by Nora Ephron,
Something about her neck( I think). The other were short stories in about Moses. We picked 2 stories in the book. We tried this out when our book group first started. It was awful. I would love to hear if there were any success stories. What worked. Are there generic questions out on the web that works. I wanted to try again but better prepared questions etc.
Susan – click on the link on Comment #1, it will take you to Christopher Meeks guest post about this subject. His idea of looking for themes is a good one; I’ll try that with the next short story collection I read.
[...] Meeks and I connected via a blog post about Jhumpa Lahiri’s award-winning Unaccustomed Earth and the difficulties I’ve [...]
[...] connected with Christopher Meeks when he responded to a post I wrote about the difficulty my book group has had discussing short stories; he wrote an excellent [...]