On a gray Monday morning, 10 women have gathered at a Greenbrae home to talk about the novel "Cane" by Jean Toomer. Eight of the women have paid the ninth, Carol Benet, to lead the discussion.

Benet, 63, is one of a new breed: the paid book club facilitator.

The very words "book club" can bring to mind the peace of a bright living room, where women balance plates on their knees, listening eagerly to one another's opinions, not letting anything distract them from serious literary discussion.

The reality is something different. As in any leaderless group, people do what they want: show up or not, read the book or not, talk the entire time or sit mute, or ignore the book and do a lot of just plain catching up with one another.

"People hire me when they tire of the anarchy of the private group," said Benet, of Tiburon, who leads so many groups she has a special reading rack on her dining room table. "They don't like the book choices, or how democratic it is, or listening to their friends. I have a lot of doctors, lawyers, lawyers that are fed up with being lawyers -- a whole range of people."

There are probably a couple of dozen facilitators working in the Bay Area, and many more nationwide. These academics and professionals, often retired, will pick a title, research it -- often providing study guides ahead of time --

and then schedule and run book club meetings, charging $300 to $500 for a 90- minute session, with no dillydallying, thank you very much.

Books are often picked either by the facilitator or in collaboration with the group. "I ask some of the groups to write down what books or themes they would like to choose," said Benet, who has a doctorate in comparative literature from UC Berkeley and taught in the same department. "Then I take their sugges-

tions and my ideas and make a reading list out of it."

Nancy Carolson, 59, of San Francisco, a former nurse and a voracious reader,

guides her groups toward books that will provoke good discussion. "I make a list each spring of suggested books that includes some classics, such as 'Cry, the Beloved Country,' a couple of topical nonfiction books and contemporary fiction.

"A favorite book of mine, 'The Moor's Last Sigh,' was tough for everybody. The pacing and the way he uses language is so different. But the groups that have read it and come away with it have said, 'Oh! OK, now I understand, now I'd like to go back and read the book again!' "

Facilitators get into this line of work more or less by chance, though now there exists a professional organization for them, the Association of Professional Book Club Facilitators in Illinois. Its founder, Rachel Jacobsohn,

is a former elementary school teacher and author of "The Reading Group Handbook." She started the organization in 1994 and keeps a database of facilitators for hire. She also leads 15 to 30 book clubs at any one time.

Benet began leading groups in 1988, when Book Passage owner Elaine Petrocelli called her up and asked her to lead a group at her store. Private groups began asking if she would lead them.

"That kept growing. I have nine groups right now."

Carolson got started seven or eight years ago when someone in her book club asked her to lead a new one being formed. Now she leads four groups that meet once a month and makes appearances at two more. Several other facilitators mentioned that they began by leading groups for organizations such as the Junior League or the Francisca Club in San Francisco.

For their money, groups get something close to a private English class. ("I'll ding my glass or something to bring them back to the book," said Carolson, who encourages members to talk to one another, not to her.)

"They kind of want to be told," said facilitator Rosemary Patton, 69, who retired from teaching English and composition at San Francisco State. "I tell them what to read, and then I go back and tell them what they've read." Like her colleagues, Patton also frequently does reading series, including Italian literature, black literature, women's biography and memoir. "I did a series on war books. The women were horrified at the idea and tried to talk me out of it,

but it was my most successful series."

Few of these leaders concern themselves much with whether the members will like the book. Benet enjoys watching her groups grow beyond such "beginning" responses as hating the characters or wishing for more plot or a more definitive ending. Ellen Werner, who belongs to Benet's book group in Greenbrae, said her other group -- one without a leader -- didn't like the novel "Disgrace" by J.M. Coetzee because they hated the main character. "Carol elevates the discussion beyond that to asking, 'Why is he so despicable?' "

It's not that members of facilitated groups think they can't discuss the book by themselves: It's that they like the feeling of becoming more sophisticated readers.

"We're looking for more than entertainment," Werner said. "Even when the book is difficult . . . the reward comes during the discussions, when Carol sheds light on what's actually going on and why."

They are also grateful to find themselves reading much more broadly. "It's exposed me to literature I wouldn't ordinarily read," said Jackie Moskowitz, 58, a history teacher at Drake High School, who is in another of Benet's groups. "Before my reading tended to be women authors, women of color. I read certain genres intensely, but was not expanding out. I had never read Paul Auster or Raymond Carver."
https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Queen-of-clubs-Paid-facilitators-introduce-2649198.php
www.sfgate.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-26
241538
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NE3F2KPX5LBAS3JGOAFERIEF346RRZH7
<urn:uuid:bbaed995-00cb-4b9d-90b0-e2157239fec0>
2019-06-20T01:40:35Z
151.101.248.200
text/html
sha1:HF7XCI57NDVVMD5TNVPPDOHEMAF25AXG
<urn:uuid:41e97cd5-4834-416a-846a-47de4d9e3259>
https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Queen-of-clubs-Paid-facilitators-introduce-2649198.php
response
<urn:uuid:aea0c2dd-2d74-4684-b30b-434e64373888>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-26
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-81-161-154.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/