Thing # 5: Litlovers

I enjoyed looking at Litlovers and I passed details of this website on to other staff at work who run or might want to run a bookclub. I really enjoyed reading about the feature bookclub and ended up being inspired to start my own bookgroup outside work - which is a good thing because I used to belong to one that was quite boring and I'd sworn never to join one again! :-) There are some great tips for making bookclubs different and interesting and I love the idea of having different food according to what book members are reading etc. I did the first Litcourse called Literature Matters: Why we Read and although I found it interesting, I felt that the summing up of the Romance genre in particular was a bit one-sided and actually incorrect in places e.g. the Tip Sheet for Love Scenes says there is only one love scene in a romance and that is near the end - well, as a Romance Reader and would-be-Romance-author, I can honestly say that most romances I read have lots of love scenes and definitely not all towards the end of the book! And the Romance reading, if based on a book written in the 1940s, is very different from what Romance authors write today. I do have to agree that I read Romance for escapism though :-)...but yes, I do read "literature" as well...and there is a place and time for both. I thought Dan Brown would be a good author to read and discuss at a bookclub meeting, and found that his book The Da Vinci Code was included in the Reading Guides. I found out all sorts of interesting things about Dan Brown and the book - there was a summary of the book (which I have read, along with all his other books - I am definitely a Dan Brown fan :-); a bio of the author, book reviews and even bookclub discussion questions. The most interesting thing I found out was what inspired him to write this book. I have saved Litlovers in My Favourites and will definitely be using it in future for finding information about books and readers and different bookclubs and also to do the other Litcourses.