1) I've never been a member of a book club, although I've discussed books online on social networks like Livejournal, and I am on Goodreads where I've learned of new authors by reading reviews posted by friends. I think I would enjoy a book club, and I would probably prefer an online one because the discussions are asynchronous which is easier to fit around my work schedule.
2) Our branch already has an excellent book club that covers a variety of general fiction and non-fiction, so one idea might be to have a genre-specific book club like a mystery book club. One possibility would be to combine mystery with what Octavia Fields does in its Read It & Eat It Book Club by focusing on titles in the growing field of culinary mysteries. A search of the online social networks for books and online book clubs pulled up several authors in this genre, including Diane Mott Davidson, Tamar Myers, Philip R Craig, Joanna Fluke, and Susan Wittig Albert to name a few. A good place to start might be with Diane Mott Davidson's Catering to Nobody, which is the first book in her Goldy Bear Culinary Mystery series.
3) For this exercise, I used Jose Saramago's Blindness. Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing all came up with just about the same rating for this book (between 4.1 and 4.2 stars out of 5 stars). I was surprised at how consistent they were, but perhaps it shouldn't be surprising considering that each of the sites had hundreds of people rating the book (popular title). I was also very impressed by the considerate and thoughtful reviews posted for the book as well as the discussion threads that raised a lot of questions, themes and ideas about the book that I hadn't considered while reading it. I learned quite a bit from the discussions.
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