Book Club, can 4 different people find a book that they can all like?

My women's group at church decided to have a book club as an enrichment activity.  Being the book lover that I am, I jumped right on the idea of leading it.  I had all these great ideas of books that we could read and discuss.  Then I talked to the other 3 people who had signed up for book club and ran into problems right away.

The 1st problem I ran into was that not everyone was on electronic media for reading.  The 2nd one was that there were those in the group that didn't want to pay for books and wanted to get them from the library.  There went my entire list of books to read and discuss right there.  Then I found that we all had different interests for what we read.

We are a religious group so we don't want to be reading books with graphic love scenes or profanity, nor do we want to read books with graphic violence.  Do you see a trend in that our reading pool is rapidly dwindling?  I had a difficult time getting a book to read for our first month and put off our monthly meeting for April.  Then I decided I had a book that was given out at a youth library event by a local author that was on the top 100 books for 2012.  I thought I had a winner.  It was available at the library and I already had a copy.

So last week I started to read the book,  20 pages in and there were 2 swear words not to mention some very adult situations.  I stopped right there and decided to not even finish the book.

Tonight is our first book club meeting.  One of the group did manage to get through the book so I guess she can tell us about it, but the biggest thing that I hope to accomplish is to agree on some rules as to what kind of books to read and where to find them.

In a world were sex sells, it is quite difficult to find wholesome good books to read.  Most of the clean books are teen reading or authors that are not well known.  The additional problem is that our library system no longer purchases trade paperbacks. They only order hardback or the larger size paperback books.

I am bound and determined to make this work.  Yes there are challenges, but by working together I think the 4 of  us can come up with some books we can all agree on.  Remember its not avoiding the challenges that make life interesting its in how you deal with the challenges that we all run into on a daily basis.