The first rule of Allport Book Club is you talk about Allport Book Club - the books you read, the books you want to read next, the books still on the TBR, the books added to the DNF, all the books, in fact.
Here at Allport, we’re all about team building. Luckily, we like each other well enough to want to spend time together outside of working hours - doing all sorts of things like volunteering, going to art museums, and watching sports. We’re also a company where people love to read – so it's only natural that we have a book club.
Our book club “membership” has been a little lapsed lately, so earlier this year I decided to revive it. Our first reinvigorated club meeting was inspired by Pizza Hut’s Book It Program. Remember that program where you got a personal pan pizza if you met your reading goal over the summer? We all set a book-to-read goal and our reward would be a Pizza Party lunch when we finished! (Not that we needed an incentive to pick up a book but it sure didn’t hurt!)
With all the different types of book clubs out there, the one that fit best with our busy lives was Show & Tell - where we each read a different book and then share it with our co-workers. Some of the titles that were discussed were All Systems Red by Martha Wells, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, Role Playing by Cathy Yardley, and This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan.
It was fascinating to learn what genres appealed to everyone and fun to wonder if their selection matched their personality or if they chose a title based more on their mood or interest. (Spoiler alert, yes both!) And as the number of pizza slices dwindled, the books we were each adding to our TBR just kept increasing!
Our NEW book club was a great success; so much so that we immediately planned to have another one for end of summer! This time we chose the theme “Novel Destinations” in which what we read took us to places we’d visited or wanted to travel to. We paired it with a potluck element where the food contributed had to relate to the location of our book. With servings of cheesesteaks, tteokbokki, and pierogis (to name a few of the delectable delights we had), can you guess where our reading took us?
Some of the places we ended up visiting during our book club:
- Seoul, South Korea (Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Boreum)
- Naomi, Florida (Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo)
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance by Mark Whitaker)
- The American Colonies (1776 by David McCullough and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell)
If I could go anywhere, I’d choose a bookstore - any bookstore! Hence my choice of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich who’s own Birchbark Books & Native Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota was the setting for the novel.
Our collective TBR’s grew even longer after hearing each other's book choices this go-around! AND, aside from the parallel universe of one science fiction thriller - Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, - we wanted to go to all the places described in the books! (You can tell we highly recommend having a book club at work. It’s so much fun and a great way to get to know your co-workers.)
As someone reading this blog - and, I’m going out on a limb here, as someone who supports Allport and has probably bought some of our fantastic literary themed cards and gifts, you know the power that words have to bring people together.
Often considered to be a solitary act that we do to enrich our minds or to escape the real world for a while, reading can also be a social activity when we talk about the stories with others.
We don’t need to be convinced with the many studies out there that reading is good for the brain. IT IS - but we do it for fun, wanting to get lost in the pages of a good book. They transport us to places and situations we normally don’t have access to and it’s so much more affordable than buying a plane ticket to get there. We understand ourselves - and one another - better when we read.
If you’re interested in starting your own book club at work (or anywhere for that matter), here are a few tips to get you going:
- Decide the format. Will you all be reading the same book or would you prefer it be more like our Show & Tell?
- Schedule your meeting in advance. Everyone’s time is precious and giving them a month or two to read a book should be plenty of time for them to feel prepared.
- Allot a specific start and end time for your gathering. If you’re like us, you can talk about books for hours on end!
We hope these tips help you find a community of readers.
Finally, please, share your recent reads - and maybe we’ll end up reading them for our next Club Meeting!
Happy Reading from Team Allport!
- Earl, from Shipping