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Why offer a short story reading/discussion group?  A number of reasons come to mind

There have been great short story collections published recently: Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Boat by Nam Le, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, Fine Just The Way It Is, by Annie Proulx, All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P Jones, all come to mind.  These books have been critical favorites, if not blockbuster best sellers. 

In addition to contemporary stories, there is a large pool of classic stories or, to put it another way, stories that have made it into best of collections, and anthologies to choose from.

Short stories are easy to distribute – you make copies and let patrons take them.  The library doesn’t need to purchase duplicate copies of books, or scramble to secure copies via inter loan.

It is easy, and advisable, to read more than one story for each get together.  That way the group can compare and contrast the two works.  For most meetings I’ve offered two writers, so the group is exposed to many different authors – instead of twelve per year we do twenty four or more. People like the wide variety a short story group can offer.

I probably don’t need to say the obvious:  short stories are succinct.  The fact that the author gets to the point pretty quickly has benefits.  My group usually zeros in on the salient points, and takes off talking from there.

People like the fact that the stories are short.  Some people don’t have much time, others read a lot and don’t want to get bogged down with something they may not like.

 The act of coming together to share ideas and reactions to good writing is a dynamic and rewarding experience.  I’ve come away from every short story reading group meeting feeling I understand the stories better.  More importantly, I’ve encouraged conversation, I’ve listened and I’ve learned.

People love these get-togethers.  The Life is Short short story group draws 15 to 20 people every month and every month I hear how thankful people are that the library offers this program.

That’s some thoughts on the “why.”  Next entry I’ll talk about the “how.”

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 8:47 am and is filed under Adult Books, Book Club Tips, Fiction, Good Books for Book Clubs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.