Free printable · for book club hosts
Ten Book Club Questions for Any Book
Ten book club discussion questions, printed on ten cards you cut out once and keep in the folder with the book. None of them needs to know what you are reading — they ask for a scene, a choice, a person or a line rather than a verdict, so "I liked it" is not an available answer, and every card carries the follow-up to ask next, which is the half that gets a room past its first answer. They ask about the book as a whole, so they suit the meeting where the club has finished it. Free book club questions usually arrive as a list on a web page, which means somebody has to read them off a phone at the table; these you hand out.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Gives you ten discussion questions that work on any book — a novel, a memoir, a history, the one your club picks in March — so nothing here goes stale when the book changes.
- Prints the follow-up on every card, under the question: "then ask" is the line that turns a one-sentence answer into a conversation, and a question you don't follow up on is small talk with a book on the table.
- Printable book club question cards, already imposed with trim marks, eight to a sheet: print pages 3-4 at 100% and cut. Sixteen cards in all — the ten questions and six blanks — at 3.55 x 2.20 in finished. Card stock is worth it; ordinary paper still works.
- Adds six blank cards so a host can write questions for the book actually in front of them, in the same shape as the printed ten.
- Carries a one-page how-to-use: how many questions an evening needs, why you ask the question as printed and then stop talking, and what to do with the ones you don't use.
- Print-and-write PDF in US Letter and A4 — no on-screen fields, nothing to sign up for, and nothing saved anywhere but the copy you print.
Related reading
- How to Run a Book Club Meeting The whole evening, from the stop point you set beforehand to the note you write after.
- What Makes a Good Book-Club Question? The four tests a question has to pass, and the ways one falls flat.
- Printable Host Kit vs Book-Club App Where an app wins, where paper wins, and why it is not the same answer for both.
- Templates for Readers & Book Clubs The rest of the reading side of the catalog, paid and free.
Own it, don't rent it
Want the other 226 book club questions, and the sheets that run the year?
The full kit is 236 questions in 12 sets — one for any book and one written for each of 11 genres — plus 88 cut-out cards and 12 sheets you fill in with a pen. Every set is split into a spoiler-safe track and a finishers-only track, because the kit assumes part of the room has not finished and those members should still have questions they can answer. Among the sheets: the Pace Matrix, which turns a book's page count and the club's number of meetings into a pages-a-day figure; the Selection & Veto Ledger, a year on one sheet of who nominated, whose turn is next and whose veto is spent; a timed meeting plan; blind nomination slips; an airtime tracker; and a year-end retrospective. Every sheet is shown filled in for an invented club, and both printable files come in US Letter and A4.
A one-time purchase you reprint as often as the club needs — paper that works in a living room, with no account for anybody to keep current on five other people's behalf.
A host's working sheet — your club, on paper. The questions are written to work without knowing the book, and no real book, author or person is named in this sheet or in the paid kit. Free to print and to pass on to another host; please don't resell it.