Book Clubs

I have been a lover of books my whole life. 2 years ago my dad turned the spare room of our house into a library for me. The shelves are already completely full so there are piles of books in almost every room of the house.
I have been a user of goodreads for a few years and always look to their reviews to aid my next purchase choice. I have an endless 'to-read' list thanks to their suggestion pages and love testing my knowledge on their fan-made quizzes.
More recently I have discovered 'booktubers': people who show their latest book hauls and review their favourites on YouTube. I haven't found one I would subscribe to yet because they tend to read a lot of books that don't interest me enough but I will keep looking.

So, as a huge book lover, I have always wanted to join a book club but never really knew how to find one. Last month, Kirsty and I were in Waterstones in Manchester Arndale when we saw a sign-up form for a teen book club. I am 23 and Kirsty is 20 so we were a bit unsure as to whether we would be allowed to go but we signed up anyway. We got an email with two book suggestions, and two dates and times for everyone on the list to vote on. We chose Thursday at 4.30 and All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven.  I emailed back asking whether it was okay that we aren't teenagers and the woman running the group said that there is no age restriction. For members of the teen book club you can purchase the book for £5 instead of £7.99 if you mention that you are a member at the checkout. However, Manchester town centre is quite far for me and Kirsty to get to so we went to our local Waterstones and used the 'Buy one get one half price' offer so Kirsty could get another book too. We have been sharing the same book with two bookmarks in and read about half of it before the book club day.

So what happened at the book club?
I'm a really shy person, I have social anxiety and it takes me ages to be able to talk in front of strangers. So for the first half hour I didn't speak at all. It was a little unorganised with no questions about the book pre-planned. I feel like asking people how they feel about a particular event in the book would have got people talking more than just a "did you like it?" but I didn't expect it to go smoothly on the first meeting.
After a while, the other members of the book club started to talk more openly about other books they had read and suggestions for next time so I think people will be more open to starting the topic with the next book.
The organisers told us that there are some authors interested in coming in to talk to us which sounds really exciting. One of the authors interested is an illustrator which I am particularly interested in. And we were told we could get priority tickets to future book signings. I expected it to just be a place where you turn up and discuss a book every few weeks, but we got so much more from it. I'm so glad we went.
We got given teen book club membership cards which we can use to get money off the book club books. And we also got given goody bags which had free books and bookmarks in and I thought it was a really cool addition.