Reading in LA

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the book club I’d like to start. It’s easy to envision the type of gathering I hope to facilitate, but more difficult to pin down the finer points of what makes a book club successful. So far, all I’ve got is a list of things that turned me off of other clubs, which leads me to…

Things that will not be discussed in my book club:
-> How we imagine the author felt when he/she was writing the book, or the degree to which the author is like/unlike his/her character(s)
-> How  like/unlike other things the novel is, unless someone is making a relevant literary correlation (we won’t, for example, be comparing the book to movies, or blogs we read)
-> Philosophy

In addition to focusing on the content of the novel (which should be a given, considering the premise of the club, but I’ve found it’s often not), I’m most interested in talking about the particular experience of reading, the novel’s craft and construction as it relates to the plot, tonal implications and undercurrents, and of course, various aspects of character. Oh, and who we would want to play us in a movie about hipster assholes discussing trendy books over Trader Joe’s wine in an Echo Park duplex.

Am I being snobby? Sometimes I feel like I’m being snobby. But really, I refuse to be an apologist for wanting a book club to feel like one.