My Storied Charlotte blog is all about celebrating Charlotte’s community of readers, but this community is really an amalgamation of many communities that are drawn together by a shared love of reading. As I see it, Charlotte’s myriad book clubs are examples of smaller communities of readers. Like the neighborhoods in a city, these book clubs have their own identities and histories even though they have much in common with each other and with the larger surrounding community. Still, a friendly sense of competition often springs up in such circumstances.
The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Foundation is providing Charlotte-area book clubs with an opportunity to compete against one another in an event called Book Club Madness. I contacted Maggie Bean, the Director of Communications with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Foundation, and I asked her for more information about this event. Here is what she sent to me:
It’s like March Madness, but we’ve substituted books for basketballs!
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Foundation is back with our second annual Book Club Madness, a free competition for local book clubs. The challenges were a big part of the success of last year’s competition and centered on Library resources and building community within the participant’s own book club. With 862 participants and 177 book clubs we knew we would need to freshen things up to bring them back again this year.
That’s why we developed new challenges including a fun tie-in with the Library’s Community Read event. In addition to our grand prize of a table at the 2024 Verse & Vino gala ($2,000 value) we will be announcing prizes for the top three scorers. We felt it was only fair to reward our book club overachievers, some scoring over 1,000 points! (To put it in perspective, book clubs must score 100 points to be included the drawing for the Verse & Vino table.)
Lastly, I want to thank WFAE for being our Book Club Madness sponsor. We are so excited to have them on our team helping us promote literacy and community. Registration is open at foundation.cmlibrary.org/bookclubmadness. Join us for a series of four weekly games starting Wednesday, March 6. All participants will receive a free custom tote bag for those loads of Library loans. Join the Madness!
Book Club Madness sounds like fun to me in part because it taps into one of pleasures associated with participating in a book club. Book clubs come in all shapes and sizes, but they all involve reading and discussing common texts. For the participants in book clubs, there is a sense of community that comes from having shared reading experiences with the other club members. These common reading experiences provide opportunities to talk about one’s personal responses to a book, to raise questions in a nonjudgmental environment, and to share favorite moments and scenes from a story. Sometimes we think of reading as a solitary activity, but participating in book clubs can help transform reading into a community-building activity. As far as I’m concerned, Book Club Madness adds to the fun of belonging to the Storied Charlotte community.
