Discussion questions that open a book up

A good discussion question cannot be answered yes or no, and it points at a decision the book made rather than at whether the reader enjoyed it. Nearly every flat book club conversation can be traced to questions that failed one of those two tests.

Why enjoyment questions stall

Asking whether people liked a book produces a round of ratings and then silence. Everyone has answered, nothing has been opened, and the group is now committed to defending positions rather than examining the book. Enjoyment is worth reaching, but it works far better as a conclusion than as an opening.

Ask about decisions

Every book is a series of choices: whose viewpoint, what to withhold, where to begin, what to leave off the page. Questions aimed at those choices give everyone the same material to work from. What does the book gain by starting where it starts? What would be lost if the second viewpoint were removed? Why is the confrontation reported rather than shown?

These questions have no correct answer, which is what makes them productive. They also do not require anyone to have loved the book, so the members who did not are still in the conversation.

Ask about specific moments

A question anchored to a scene beats a question about the whole book. Groups discuss a page far more readily than a theme, and the theme arrives anyway once two people disagree about what a scene was doing. Naming a chapter and asking what changes in it is often enough to fill twenty minutes.

A workable sequence

Open with a low-stakes question that everyone can answer, such as which moment stayed with them. Move to two or three structural questions about decisions. Follow the disagreement that emerges, since the best conversation is nearly always the one nobody planned. Close with the evaluative question, once there is enough shared ground for the answers to mean something.

Questions that narrow a room

Steer clear of questions that ask people to identify with a character, which narrow quickly to biography and exclude anyone who did not. Avoid questions whose phrasing contains their answer. And avoid questions that require having liked the book, since the members who did not are precisely the ones with the most to say about how it works.

Publisher-supplied questions

Question sets printed at the back of a book are a reasonable starting point and are usually written to be inoffensive. Take two, discard the rest and write one of your own about something the group actually argued about in the reading. A single specific question beats ten general ones.