A little over a year ago while out to dinner with two of my best friends we started chatting about how we had all set a goal to put aside more time to enjoy reading again. Kids, work, and life can put simple pleasures like reading on the back burner and we were ready to bring good literacy back into our lives! We all agreed a book club was the answer! We began planning that night and decided that we wanted to ask our neighbors to join us in an effort to connect each other to neighborhood friends each of us already had but also to create community connections within our neighborhood with people we didn’t know all that well. The result has been one of my favorite goals achieved.

We settled on the book, This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel which was Reese Witherspoon’s Bookclub choice at the time. We started reaching out and inviting neighbors Immediately. Some kindly declined while others were excited to join. We ended up with 11 people committed to joining us, one of those people is an out of towner who we let infiltrate, haha.  She was looking to join a book club that was actually going to read and discuss the book and wasn’t having success in her community.  We switch houses every month and whoever hosts gets to pick the next book.  

At the end of this year we hosted the first annual “Bookies Awards”! We sent out a poll and everyone voted on topics such as Favorite Female character, favorite male character, Best Author, The Malificent Award for the most evil character, and Best Book. 

It was a great night with lots of food, laughter, and wine!

I can't wait to spend time with my neighbors who are all now great friends and to read all the books everyone picks this year.

Here are some other great ideas to get to know people you might not meet otherwise in your community:

• Start a monthly supper club

• Join local clubs i.e. town gardening club, running club, or sewing group

• Plan a neighborhood block party

• Start a town Facebook group

• Start a town adult softball or basketball team

• Volunteer as a board member i.e. PTO, Education Foundation, or SEPAC