Two book club evenings can be spent on the same novel. In one, everyone agrees it was lovely, someone mentions the rain, and you are home by half nine. In the other, a question about the ending splits the room and you are still arguing about it in the car park. The book is rarely the difference. Twenty minutes of preparation usually is.

Read the last third with a pencil in your hand

Most readers mark nothing. They finish the book, put it down, feel something, and by the following Tuesday they can remember the mood and one scene. That is enough for a quiet evening, but not for a good one.

So read the final third with a pencil somewhere near you, even if you never usually write in books. Keep it light: a short underline, a page number scribbled inside the back cover, a question mark beside a paragraph you found unconvincing. It is much easier to say something useful when you have something to point at.

The one-page preparation sheet

Once you have finished, take a single sheet of paper and give it five headings. One side only. A crowded sheet of notes is worse than none, because you will spend the meeting hunting for the right line instead of listening to the person speaking.

1. Themes. Two or three, written as full sentences rather than single words.
2. Questions. Five is plenty, and they should be questions you genuinely do not know the answer to.
3. Quotations. Three short ones, with page and chapter.
4. Something I did not understand. A scene, a shift in time, a choice that made no sense to you.
5. One comparison. Another book, a film, a piece of family history. Bringing in something from outside the novel tests your reading against it.

The sheet takes about twenty minutes. It works for the person chairing, and it works just as well for someone who has never spoken at a meeting and would like to start.

Themes: write tensions, not nouns

Most first attempts at themes look like this: love, grief, class, memory. Those are subjects, and a discussion about a subject has nowhere much to go. A theme is what the book is arguing about that subject.

Try turning it into a tension. Choosing to be alone against being left alone. Grief that is shared against grief that is performed. Loyalty to a place against loyalty to a person. Now you have something the group can disagree about, which is the whole point.

How to find one

Look at what the book keeps returning to: an image used twice, a recurring gesture, two characters who have the same argument in different rooms. Look at the ending, and ask what it settles and what it refuses to settle. Then look at what the author withholds. No interior life for a particular character, no scene of forgiveness, no description of the room where the important thing happened. Absences count as much as anything on the page.

Questions that open a room up

Good questions are specific, arguable, and answerable in more than one way. They tend to start with which, when or how much rather than do you agree.

• Whose version of events did you trust, and at what point did that change?
• Which decision would you have made differently, and what would it have cost?
• When did you realise what kind of book this was?
• What does the novel leave out, and is that a choice or a gap?
• Which character is treated least fairly by the narrative?
• If the book ended fifty pages earlier, what would be lost?

Ask one, then wait. Reading groups are full of polite silences, and most of them last about four seconds longer than anyone can bear. Count to ten before you rescue the room; somebody is usually assembling a thought.

Questions that close a room down

"Did you like it?" works as a warm-up and then becomes a dead end. "Who was your favourite character?" produces a list rather than a discussion. Anything with one correct answer — who wrote the letter, what year this is set — can be settled in a sentence, so save those for the end if you need them.

Quotations worth reading aloud

Choose three short passages and read them exactly as written, without introducing them. Explain afterwards, not before. Half the pleasure is hearing the sentence land cold on the room.

Call me Ishmael.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Both do the work of a long summary in a line, which is why they get quoted. Yours do not need to be famous. They need to be short enough to hold in the ear.

Page numbers vary between editions, so give the chapter too, or read the opening few words aloud so others can find the passage. If some of the group read on a phone or an e-reader, agree in advance whether you will use chapters instead of pages. It saves five minutes of confusion at every meeting.

Chairing without dominating

Whoever chairs has one job: keeping the conversation moving between other people. Open with a sentence or two about what the group is discussing, not a full plot summary, then ask your first question and let it run. If you have answered twice in ten minutes, stop talking.

Room for the half-finished

Plenty of people arrive having read two hundred pages of a four-hundred-page novel, usually because of a bad week rather than a bad attitude. Make it easy for them. Say at the start that nobody has to have finished, and ask those who stopped where they stopped. What makes a reader put a book down is often more revealing than what makes another finish it. If the ending must be discussed, warn the room first so nobody has it spoiled while reaching for a biscuit.

Your twenty minutes before the meeting

1. Reread your three quotations and find their chapters.
2. Mark the single question you most want answered.
3. Write one sentence you would say if asked to sum up the book. You may never need it.
4. Check the practical details: who is hosting, what you are bringing, whether the next book and date are agreed. Someone always leaves without agreeing the date.

Turn up with a sheet of paper, one question you actually care about, and a willingness to be argued with, and the evening looks after itself. The best reading groups are not the ones that agree. They are the ones where a quiet member finally says what they thought of the last chapter, and the room goes still.

Photo: DGlodowska / Pixabay