A Book Club Idea

For full disclosure, I am part of a youth collective called Akademi Belia. We organise and run programmes catered towards youth development. Some examples of the programmes that we have conducted are futsal tournaments, talks with prominent leaders such as Tun Dr Mahathir, helping out with soup kitchen efforts as well as cultural exchange programmes with youths from different countries (such as China and Russia). Most (if not all) of the programmes are run within the Klang Valley area, so little old me in Penang here can’t attend all of them.

I like being part of this youth collective. They comprise of passionate, competent and fun-loving people, and a lot of times I feel like I have the least to contribute, which is good since with that feeling, I know that I’m around good company.

For the upcoming year, I have proposed a programme of my own. It’s still in its inception stage, so the idea’s unpolished and rough around the edges, but writing this down will hopefully make it clearer both to me, to Akademi Belia as well as to anyone who might be interested.

So it’s basically a book club. A bunch of people get together every couple of weeks and talk about a specific book (what it’s about, what they liked about it, what they didn’t like about it, why). And the fruits of that discussion shall be recorded and made into a youtube video, for everyone else to join in the discussion in the comments.

How it’s gonna work is like this:

Step 1: I shall post a poster on twitter/instagram/facebook declaring that a meet-up will happen in two weeks. In that poster shall contain the book that shall be discussed as well as the date, time, place of the meet-up. Anybody interested in joining shall have two weeks to read/re-read the book for the meet-up. It’ll be done on a weekend, in a public space.

Step 2: On the day of the get-together, we’ll talk about the book, what it’s about, what we liked about it, what we didn’t like about it, the reasons for our opinions. We’ll record some of the discussion to be put up on Youtube. And we’ll eat pizza. Or kuih bahulu. Or whatever anybody wants to bring. (I don’t expect more than 5 people to come, so we’ll have plenty of food to go around yay!) After about an hour of eating and talking, we’d have made some new friends and gained some fresh perspectives of the book we were reading! And food!

Step 3: About a week afterwards, the video of the book discussion shall be uploaded onto Youtube. And steps 1-3 shall be repeated again.

I like reading books. And I love talking about them too. And I know that there are people out there that share this interest. But I’ve found that the right place and time to talk about them are hard to come by. So hopefully, by doing this book club thing, we’ll all get to gather and do exactly that, at least once a month. It’ll be fun, and we’ll eat food! Okay now if it’s not abundantly obvious that I really like food, then taktau la.

And this activity shouldn’t be exclusive. Anybody who’s anybody can join. If you come having read the book, then that’s great. If you haven’t read the book but still want to come, then there’s nothing stopping you. We’ll hang out.

It’s simple stuff, but it is within my hopes that we’ll gain something positive from it.

Again, this is just a rough idea. Whether or not it’ll work out in real life, we’ll see.

I don’t have a name for it yet. Any suggestions?