About The Goodreads Book Club
Why another book club?
Goodreads is already a gathering place for more than 5 million people to come together with their friends and bond over good, great, and not-so-successful books. Now Goodreads would like to take the book club experience to the next level.
The Goodreads Book Club is a new kind of project. We'd like to ask you to read a book along with hundreds of thousands of Goodreads members worldwide. Instead of getting together in a living room with a glass of wine, we've created an on-line total book immersion extravaganza. Take the challenge, ask the author questions via live chat, join chapter by chapter discussions, hear from experts, post your favorite quotes, share creative writing, take polls, trivia and quizzes --all about one book. There is no minimum or maximum involvement; you can be as active as you wish.
Why now?
We're the largest community of readers in the world, and in celebration of our five millionth member, we'd like to bring our community together in a meaningful way. It's also a big experiment. Let's take one book and dig in at the same time. It's our fervent belief that reading leads to the sharing of ideas and personal and societal growth. It's also fun. Our goal is to show all of the various ways people can interact with a book and, hopefully, with each other. As Oprah exits the book club stage, we enter.
Why A Visit from the Goon Squad?
Several months ago we noticed something interesting about Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad on our site. Although the numbers of readers were not huge, the reviews were glowing, delightful, passionate. Our members were on fire about this book. Curious, every single member of the Goodreads staff sat down and read it. And simply put, we all loved the book and suspected it would appeal to a broad audience. Then came the outside accolades: Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and upcoming HBO series. Ultimately, we felt that this a timely book, one that is uniquely suited to a platform like Goodreads. And of course we really, really enjoyed reading it. We think you will too.
How did you choose this book? And will there be another Goodreads Book Club in the future?
We chose A Visit from the Goon Squad because we loved it and because our friends on Goodreads were excited about it. We felt it had something to offer a wide variety of readers. It was chosen very organically, and that's how we're going to choose all of the Goodreads Book Club books. We are not accepting pitches for the book club. While we don't have a strict timetable for how often we'll hold the book club, we anticipate this being a recurring project, something we do when we find that next perfect book!
