What makes a good book club pick?

Every book club has had the meeting where everyone loved the book, said so in the first ten minutes, and spent the rest of the evening on holiday plans. Agreement is pleasant and terrible for conversation. The books that make a club worth going to are the ones that split the room.

The four tests

1. Is there something to disagree about? The best picks have a moral knot, an ambiguous ending, a narrator you are not sure you trust, or a big idea you can push back on. If you can imagine two reasonable people leaving with opposite views, it is a good sign.

2. Can people finish it? Length matters more than anyone likes to admit. A book that most members abandon halfway produces a meeting about the first half. For a monthly club, something most people can read in two or three weeks of normal evenings is the sweet spot. Our list of short novels for a weekend is a good hunting ground.

3. Are there characters to judge? People talk easily about other people, including fictional ones. Would you have done what she did? Is he a coward or just trapped? Characters with choices give everyone an entry point, even members who are not keen on discussing style.

4. Is there a world to talk about? A place, a period or a profession the group does not know well gives you a second conversation alongside the plot. Food, landscape and history all work.

Picks that tend to work

• A novel with a hard choice at its heart. Niccolò Ammaniti's I'm Not Scared, from 2001, follows a nine-year-old boy in a tiny southern village who makes a discovery during a scorching summer. It is short, gripping and full of questions about loyalty and growing up. See our page on I'm Not Scared.
• A book about memory and a vanished world. Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, published in 1962, gives you a narrator looking back on his youth in Ferrara, a family behind a garden wall, and the 1938 racial laws closing in. There is the novel to discuss and, if you like, Vittorio De Sica's 1970 film to compare.
• A nonfiction argument. Books that make a bold claim are excellent for clubs because everyone has an opinion on the claim, whether or not they liked the prose. The Courage to Be Disliked, a dialogue built around Alfred Adler's ideas, reliably divides readers into those who find it freeing and those who find it too neat.
• A classic nobody has quite read. Most groups contain people who have always meant to. A shared deadline is often what gets them through.

Picks that tend to fall flat

• The universally adored bestseller. If everyone already loves it, there is little to say.
• The very long book in one month. Better split across two meetings, or saved for a summer read.
• The book only one person wanted. If the chooser has to sell it hard, the meeting will feel like a defence.
• Books with no story and no argument. Lovely prose alone rarely fills an evening.

How to choose as a group

Rotate the choice, but give the chooser a shortlist rule: they bring three options with a sentence each and the group votes. That way everyone has a little ownership and nobody carries the blame alone. Mix fiction and nonfiction, old and new, and occasionally choose something nobody in the group would pick on their own. For the practical side of keeping a group going, see how to start a book club that lasts.