“A Book Club for Curmudgeons” at Moon Lake Library

Book clubs have become increasingly popular in recent years. Schools use them to encourage students to engage with literature. My neighborhood in Athens, Georgia, had its own Sunday afternoon book club, complete with wine and snacks. The new local independent bookstore in Fort Payne is even named Book Club and hosts a number of different gatherings for customers interested in connecting with others over books.

A lifelong book lover, I once looked forward to being part of a group created around discussions about books. But as a busy person with a lengthy TBR (To Be Read) list and too little time, I didn’t adapt well to reading books selected by others. It didn’t leave enough time to read what I wanted to read. At the same time, I wanted recommendations from other enthusiastic readers but without feeling pressure each month to read what someone else had selected.

Hence, the Moon Lake Library Book Club, which I think of as “A Book Club for Curmudgeons.” It evolved over time from a gathering devoted to reading the same book to a group that got together to share what they’d been reading lately. Now it’s a group that meets to discuss books with a common theme, author, genre, or other underlying similarity. This latest version has worked well for us over the last couple of years.

We’ve devoted a month to works by Wendell Berry and Janisse Ray. We’ve read a graphic novel of our own choosing and books that were collections of short pieces, like stories, essays, or meditations. We’ve chosen books around the theme of horror, leading to discussions about what we each find terrifying. We’ve read and recommended books about travel, art and artists, food, and home. I encourage readers to interpret the themes loosely if they like.

What we’ve found is that it makes it easy to join at any given month, plus it keeps costs down, as we don’t have to read the same books. And in the occasional instance when we do decide to read the same book, it makes it special. One of the advantages of being a public library is that the Alabama Public Library Service makes book club kits available to us. When we decided to read Bill Bryson’s story about hiking the Appalachian Trail, APLS came through for us with ten copies of A Walk in the Woods.

Between eight and twelve of us get together on the second Saturday of each month at 10:30 a.m. and give a five-minute-or-so overview of one or sometimes more books. I write up the list of recommendations and post it on Substack, along with the next month’s theme. It’s been great fun and has led us to try many books we would not otherwise have even heard of. We enjoy hearing about a range of titles. Some may be children’s or young adult. Others are literary award winners or nonfiction. Sometimes it’s a bestseller. We never know what we’re going to hear about, and that keeps it fresh for all of us.

If you’d like to try the Moon Lake Library Book Club, please join us the second Saturday of the month. The club decided that in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, we would read books with American themes this year. In March, we’ll read books about recent American history, fiction or nonfiction, set in the past 50 or so years. Please see the accompanying graphic that gives the themes for 2026, and I hope we’ll see you at the library and hear what you’ve been reading.