Brown Bag Book Club Begins Fall 2025 Meetings
The Brown Bag Book Club is having their first meeting of the year on Sept. 30 from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. The club is sponsored by Kat Williamson and Patrick Morgan and is hosted monthly in the library. The club promotes itself as a low-commitment book club.
This book club does not have an assigned book for each month; its readers are free and encouraged to bring whatever they have been reading recently, whether finished or unfinished, to talk about. The discussion is also not only limited to books, though; members can also talk about films they have seen, music they have been listening to, or readings for classes that they find interesting, or they can bring nothing at all and just be ready and willing to contribute to the discussion. The club is intended as a space for people to expand their horizons in different kinds of genres and media, and it aims to promote different ideas and thoughts. “We end up sitting there and solving the world’s problems,” says Williamson.
Brown Bag Book Club member Kay Christopher has been attending meetings since the club was started and rarely misses a meeting. They say that they appreciate the more relaxed atmosphere, and they often times do not even bring anything to read and instead just talk about a piece or pieces of media that they have been observing. “I have more than once talked about a video game, or a movie, or a show, or an article I read, or an idea I saw that I just wanted to bring to everybody,” Christopher says. They say that the point of the club is more so to bring together lots of different ideas and topics rather than everyone reading one book and discussing only that; “it’s a fun group of people to be with to let topics wander.”
Kat Williamson founded the club four years ago when she arrived at the Magale library. Her boss at her former job would make the librarians sit down and tell her about all the books that they had been reading as a way for them to discover more books in the library to then share with the patrons. Williamson decided to bring that concept of an informal book club to Centenary so that people could enjoy a book club without all the commitment of having an assigned book to read. She comments that she enjoys the variety of what people bring: “I’m not really a manga reader, but hearing about it is really interesting.” She also has gotten to know other members of the club who like similar genres to her, particularly bonding over shared love of Soviet-era Russian novels.
The club meets during lunch, and, despite what the name suggests, food is provided, normally snack foods like crackers, cheese, and chips. The club meetings are normally a small group of Williamson, Morgan, and then three to five members, but Williamson says that she enjoys “when new and different people come,” as having larger groups of people is an easy way to make discussion livelier and more intriguing for all people.