What do you mean by salon concept? My only book club attempt was kind of disastrous. We tried to do the Booker winners and we hated most of them.

Instead of everyone reading the same book, we pick a theme and people read any book that fits the theme. It is mostly people who are looking to read classics, so I came up with a few themes and suggested book lists that were mostly classics with a few contemporary classics.

Our first theme was quests. Here is the list I proposed:
Aeneid
Beowulf
Don Quixote
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Lord of the Rings
Moby-Dick
Le Morte d’Arthur
Odyssey
The Pilgrim's Progress
The Road
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Watership Down
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Stephen King's "The Body"

Here's what people read:
Dante's Inferno
Don Quixote
Moby-Dick
The Razor's Edge
The Road
Watership Down

Our next theme is eponymous heroines.

Cherchez la femme!

Classic Novels and Plays
Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
Emma (Jane Austen)
Hedda Gabler (Ibsen)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
Lysistrata (Aristophanes)
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Manon Lescaut (Prévost)
Medea (Euripides)
Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe)
Nana (Émile Zola)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)

Children’s Literature
Mary Poppins (P. L. Travers)
Coraline (Neil Gaiman)
Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lindgren)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding)
Carrie (Stephen King)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles)
Lolita (Nabokov)
My Ántonia (Willa Cather)
Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark)
Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser)
Sophie’s Choice (William Styron)

Rebecca's cheating! She's not the heroine!

That's a great theme, though,

And man, $12.99 for a brand-new book is great incentive to think about a Kindle.

Mostly the themes revolve around the “should-read” books I decided I need to read this year (for example, Don Quixote and My Antonia for the above lists).

So we will do “Classic Boys Adventures” to force me to get through The Count of Monte Cristo and "Dystopian Novels" for The Handmaid’s Tale, and "Russian Roulette" for War and Peace. There's also “Water, Water, Everywhere" and then I'm going to propose "Classic Horror" in October.

I love that idea for a book club. It makes me want to start one up again.

Rebecca's cheating! She's not the heroine!

True, but I think that very point will be great for discussion. I really hope someone reads it.

The great thing about focusing on the classics was that even if someone hadn't read a particular book for the salon, they could talk about it and add to the discussion because they had read it in the past.

For quests, I cribbed some notes from Joseph Campbell and we discussed the hero's journey and whether our book fit the classic mythology model, etc.

I really like the idea for the book club, megan. How often are you meeting?

Well, the original idea was once a month, but since so many people picked longish books, we're thinking that might be too often.

What we decided after our first meeting (where everyone was really thrilled with the discussion) was that we would continue with quests next time but pick our next topic (so we had a bit more time to read).

So, for next time, some people are finishing their quest book, some are reading a second shorter quest book, but others are starting on longer eponymous heroines (Jane Eyre and Anna Karenina I believe).

Note: This is a work thing, so we just head out for drinks after work so it's easy to coordinate.

Wow, so you like, read things? And talk to people? Socially? People who don't exist on the internet? Oh, brave new world.