Welcome fellow book lovers

Isn’t this awesome? We’re kicking off a newsletter just for the bibliophiles in our community and from now on you can receive it every fortnight.  (For those who haven’t signed up, you can do so by clicking here.)

The Starts at 60 Book Club has been an informal community-led project since the site began, and over time it has grown and grown. And look at us now – book reviews and articles most days of the week, with our endeavours now supported by publisher Hachette Australia and bookseller Dymocks!

So from here on we are bringing you our fortnightly Book Club emailer with all the books that us over 60s love. We’ll be bringing you competitions, engaging conversations about books and interviews with your favourite authors – not to mention a greater love of books than we can get in other places in the media today.

And we want something in return: we want to have great discussions about books with you.  Please let us know the genres you most enjoy, the books you most love and the things you want more of. With the diversity of people writing reviews for Starts at 60, we get good coverage of most genres, but we want to know what YOU want.

A little trivia for you:

• It was 9 July 2013 when Starts at 60 announced our first book club choice, the classic F Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby.
• Vivienne Beddoe is an original book club reviewer, part of the group since its inception in 2013.

We’ll be publishing a whole lot of book bites on the site, almost daily. You’ll also find books for your grandchildren in our new Grandkids, Let’s Read column on Mondays.  Reading is one of the joys of life for many of us and sharing this with the younger generation is so gratifying.

We have a great community team of book reviewers to whom we have to give special thanks:  Jess Cammack, John Reid, Laraine Fisher, Marlene Sanders and Vivienne Beddoe. Their continuing input into the book club has been inspiration; between them they produce so many quality reviews.  If you would like to contribute your own reviews to the Book Club, please get in touch.

And so, I have two little requests for you:

1.  Get involved!  

When you read a book you enjoy, please share it with us by writing your own review. A review can be any length, as the aim is to publish a “Recommendations from the Members” column monthly. Likewise, if you read something recommended by a reviewer, we would love to know your thoughts. You are also most welcome to write a longer review; it would be awesome to have a guest reviewer each month.

2.  Tell your friends and share our emailer.  

Your friends can sign up for our regular book club emailer by clicking here.  Send it on to them and encourage them to be a part of the community that loves to read.

There will be competitions, book giveaways, community recommendations and more…  I can’t wait to watch it grow with you!

If you have ideas or reviews, or want to get more involved, don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected].

‘Til next time, happy reading.

Karen

Join the Starts at 60 Book Club