We have had a book group at Crosby since 1994. It was started as an outreach project with the May Community Center in Huffman while it was still part of the Crosby service area. The Atascocita Branch opened in 1996. There was also a Ladies Book Group that met at the library but was not associated with it. Both groups continued to meet separately for a couple of years. The May Community Center group members would fluctuate but after a couple of years the numbers stabilized and for the most part not only were the same people in both groups but all of the ladies lived in Crosby. In 1996 when the May Community became very busy and had a hard time finding room for us, we combined the two groups and moved the group to the library. For the most part I've have lead the book group. Carolyn Allen lead it for a time but I took it back when her duties expanded and she didn't have enough time to devote to it. Personally, I like the opportunity to meet face to face to discuss the books.
The Crosby Book Group could almost be called a mystery themed group because that would cover the majority of the books. We have read in various genres from biographies, nonfiction, general fiction and classics, adult, young adult and children's but the most common genre is mystery. Suggestions are requested every month and I try to find books that will fill the requests. The one genre they will not read is romance, since most are widows I guess that makes a certain amount of sense. Sometimes they leave it up to me and I have used both NovelList Plus and ReadingGroupGuides for possible titles. For us, the book is always the starting point for the discussion. After that ... it could and often does goes anywhere.
For the last exercise I searched for the book Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey on both LibraryThing and Goodreads. In Librarything the book was owned by 3118 people and had an average rating of 4.02. On Goodreads, it was owned by 3554 and had an average rating of 4.09. The ratings are very similar with a comparable number of people which really didn't surprise me. Anne McCaffrey has been a very popular author for four decades and has a huge following.
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