By JOANNE KAUFMAN


Jocelyn Bowie was thrilled by the invitation to join a book group.
She had just returned to her hometown, Bloomington, Indiana, to take an administration job at Indiana University, and thought she had won a ticket to a top echelon.“I was hoping to network with all these women in upperlevel jobs at I.U., then I found they were in the book group,”she said.“I thought,‘Great! They’ll see how wonderful I am, and we’ll have these great conversations about books.’”

Ms.Bowie cannot pinpoint the precise moment when disillusion replaced delight, but the breaking point came when the group picked “The Da Vinci Code” and someone suggested the discussion would be enriched by delving into the author’s source material.“It was bad enough that they wanted to read ‘Da Vinci Code’ in the first place,”Ms.Bowie said,“but then they wanted to talk about it.”She quit shortly after, making up a polite excuse:“I told the organizer,‘You’re reading fiction, and I’m reading history right now.’”

Today there are perhaps 4 million to 5 million book groups in the United States. And more clubs means more acrimony. The most common cause of dissatisfaction and departures?

“It’s because there’s an ayatollah,”said Esther Bushell, a professional book-group facilitator who leads a dozen suburban New York groups.“This person expects to choose all the books and to take over all the discussions.”

For Doreen Orion, a psychiatrist in Boulder, Colorado, the spoiler in her group was a drama queen who turned every meeting into her own personal therapy session.“There were always things going on in her life with relationships, and she’d want to talk about it,”she said.“There’d be some weird thing in a book and she’d relate it to her life no matter what. Everything came back to her. It was really exhausting after a while.”

What attracted Susan Farewell to a book group called the IlluminaTea were guidelines that precluded such off-putting antics.“It was very high-minded,”said Ms.Farewell, a travel writer in Westport, Connecticut. The high standards also extended to the club’s refreshment table.“When it was your month to host a meeting, you would do your interpretation of a tea, and the teas got very competitive,”Ms.Farewell said. Homemade scones and Devonshire cream were common offerings, and Ms.Farewell remembers spending the day before her hostess stint making watercress and smoked salmon sandwiches.

This started to feel oppressive.“If the standards had been more relaxed, I would have stayed in the group,”she said.“But I just felt I couldn’t keep getting clotted cream. I couldn’t work and carry on the formality and get through the novel every month, so I just said I couldn’t make the meetings anymore.”

As for Ms.Bowie, she was asked to join another group but has chosen to stay unaffiliated.“My experience was a real disappointment,”she said.“Now when I look at a novel in a store and it has book group questions in the back, it almost puts me off from buying it.”