Goodreads Starts Book Club

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As Goodreads closes in on its 5 millionth registered member, the book-themed social networking site is launching the Goodreads Book Club on Wednesday, May 25, with a party at Housing Works Cafe in New York City, featuring musical guests Care Bears on Fire and Jennifer Egan, whose NBCC- and Pulitzer-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, will be the club’s inaugural selection.

“We have a huge membership, but for each member the experience is really shaped by what friends they have, what books they choose to read,” said Patrick Brown, Goodreads’s community manager. “This is the first time that we’re providing one place where theoretically everybody on the site can get together and talk about a book.”

Although Egan has not been a member of Goodreads, she did not hesitate when approached about the project. “They were interested in using Goon Squad for their book club, and I was, of course, delighted,” she said. “Book groups provide such a gigantic service to the world of books. It can be so hard if you read a book you love to find people to talk about it with. I feel like book groups have helped to maintain a sense of community around reading. That’s good for the industry, and for writers, and for everyone–so I try to participate whenever I can, by Skype or by phone. I was interacting with book clubs by speakerphone long before there was Skype–and if they’re local, I try to come if I can.”

Egan has also been active as a book club member, reading for years with a circle of friends that revisited classic literature, “books that all of us had read at other points in our lives, but we wanted to revisit as grown-ups.” Reading Proust with that group, she added, was one of the motivating factors for writing A Visit from the Goon Squad. “When we finished, though, I took a bit of a break,” she admitted. “They’re still meeting, and they’re all friends, so I pretty much assume that I’ll reintegrate. But it was hard to find even one night a month I wanted to be away from the kids for another thing.”

That should be less of an issue for the Goodreads club, whose members are able to participate whenever they have time to log in to the site. Although Goodreads has conducted a similar site-wide promotion before, inviting members to enter a “Jane EyreChallenge” tied to the release of the latest film adaptation, the plans for Goon Squad are of a larger scale. Over two months of book club activity, participants will be able to engage in chapter-by-chapter discussions, show off their favorite quotes from the books, enter a writing contest thematically connected to the novel’s famous “PowerPoint chapter,” and submit questions for a live chat with Egan at the end of July. The chat is one of the few instances in which Egan will be directly participating in the club. “It’s important for people to be able to read the book and talk about it with their friends without feeling like the author is there lurking all the time,” Brown explained. (Egan will also judge the writing contest.)

Choosing the hot book of the moment is certainly one way to call attention to a new club, but that, Brown said, is a happy accident; the selection was made several months before the novel began accumulating prizes. “It feels funny to say it now, but at the time, we thought it was a great book–people on the site who reviewed it really loved it, it was the kind of book that people wanted to tell their friends about,” he said. “But I was worried that it wasn’t going to win the big awards, that it wasn’t going to get noticed beyond that core group of people who were already in love with it. And we just felt it was a book that offered something to lots of different kinds of readers.”

What happens after they reach the final chapter of Goon Squad? Brown said Goodreads is definitely interested in taking the most successful features of this book club and rolling them over into future installments, most likely on an annual basis but possibly more often–or, like Oprah Winfrey’s club, whenever they find another book the entire staff can get behind. For now, he said, “I’m hoping that a lot of people will take us up on this offer and we’ll have an enormous, fun conversation for the next couple months.”