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Mostly Cloudy One book club meeting to go, please
Oceanside Public Library lends entire discussions to patrons
Hosting a book club, while fun, is a lot of work. It’s more than just getting a few people who read the same book to sit together in a room and talk about it. There is a lot of background research about the author and the book that goes into hosting a successful book club.
But now the Oceanside Public Library is loaning out that entire experience to its patrons — packed into a convenient bag.
“Book Club in a Bag is a service to our patrons that gives them everything they need to run their own independent book discussion group,” said Oceanside Library Director Evelyn Rothschild. “Each kit contains 10 copies of the book, a written summary, author biographies and interviews, book reviews and discussion questions.”
The program is new to the library, although it has been in the planning stages for a few months. The library has been hard at work gathering all of the materials and books, and organizing them for the Book Club bags.
The Oceanside Library itself only has six titles available. However, it’s part of a consortium of nine libraries that, between them, have more than 200 titles available for patrons through inter-library loans.
Patrons interested in borrowing Book Club bags from Oceanside can do it simply by coming into the library. The six titles — “The Piano Teacher,” “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Red Thread,” “The Three Weissmanns of Westport,” “The Tiger’s Wife” and “The Widower’s Tale” — are all popular, in-demand fiction. “They’re not this week’s No. 1 best-seller, but they’re all books that have a consistent demand,” said Rothschild. The bags are available on six-week loans.
Unlike regular inter-library loans, which patrons can request online, inter-loan Book Club bags need to be requested in-person at the library. “If it’s another library’s Book Club bag,” Rothschild said, “it can take a few days to get here, but not more than that.”
Although Oceanside only has six titles available now, it has plans to expand its collection in the future. But for the titles it does have, the library tries to make the Book Club in a Bag experience as easy as possible.
“[Patrons can] just come into the library and fill out a request form,” said Rothschild. “And if the kit is available in our library and they want to take it that day, they can.”
