I was pleased to read your book club information. I, too, belong to one and there are 9 of us, 2 of which are of the opposite sex. We are an eclectic group ranging from 30 to 70, teachers, blue collar workers, administrative assistants, homemakers. Are we unique? Do men not join book clubs?
Very good question! Absolutely men are in book clubs but I didn't feel that the numbers we had responding to the survey were sufficient for robust reporting of results so felt it best to focus just on the women. I have no empirical data on this but, based on years of interviewing book clubs (you can read these in our book club section) I get the impression that while some groups are all women and actively want to stay that way, others are open to having men - just haven't had any join, while others are happily mixed.
Then there are some all male book clubs - we've interviewed a few over the years - but they may not take a form of the "traditional" group sitting in the living room. For example, a friend's father has commuted the same route for many years and gets together on the train with a bunch of friends and they talk books. From what I was told it sounded like the discussion was pretty structured - agreeing books, discussing them - but when I suggested to my friend that it would be great to interview her father she said that she didn't think that would be a good idea as she didn't think that he really thought of it as a club as such!
Continuing on this train of thought - a considerable number of people, both men and women, belong to non traditional groups. In the survey we asked those who said they belonged to a book club that did not meet in person how their group met.
The answers were fascinating - ranging from people meeting online in clubs that in essence mimic a traditional club - such as BookBrowse's book club - to people who were very active in sites such as paperback book swaps - to people who chat with their family regularly about books. Although some of these felt to me to be stretching the definition of a book club too far for the purposes of reporting stats in the infographic (and thus were excluded) the point is that the people involved were talking about books regularly in a environment in which they felt they belonged - which sounds pretty much like a book club to me!
We are an eclectic group ranging from 30 to 70, teachers, blue collar workers, administrative assistants, homemakers. Are we unique? Do men not join book clubs?