The North Suffolk Library is refocusing on classics in its revamped book club offering.

The new book club will be held at 1 p.m. the second Wednesday of every month beginning March 9. The first classic will be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”

The club was restructured to prompt more attendance and better discussion, said Kirk Morrison, public services manager at the North Suffolk Library.

“We’ve always been wanting to increase the attendance” at the book club, Morrison said. “We wanted to inject some new life into it.”

The library has observed through other events that people are just as willing to attend midday events as they are evening events, Morrison said.

“We wanted to try offering it in midday to see if that will just alone have the attendance go up,” Morrison said.

More importantly, though, the book club is taking on a unified theme — “Classics for the Rest of Us” — that library officials also hope will draw more attendance.

“Before, we had a very eclectic choice of books,” Morrison said. “Readers came the one or two times a year the book was actually of interest to them. It seemed like if it went out of some folks’ specific reading interests, they might not come.”

The book club decided to re-brand itself with classical books — those that most people have read, but some may have missed out on or would like to revisit.

“The classics really seem to be something we can hang our hat on,” Morrison said. “The classics tend to be those books that provoke discussion,” while other books might be “page-turners, but they’re not really discussion-oriented.”

Fitzgerald’s best-known work became the inaugural discussion topi,c because it was already on the club’s list to cover, Morrison said. Plus, its issues are very relevant today, he said.

“That conspicuous consumption you see in ‘The Great Gatsby’ is not all that different from the challenges we’ve seen in the past few years,” Morrison said. “It is not just a classic, but something very classically American in people striving for success and trying to capture their dreams at all costs.”

Like all the library’s book club offerings, the new club is open to anybody, Morrison said.

“Everybody is welcome,” he said. “We’re interested in hearing what they have to say. We’re encouraging everybody to take part.”

More information can be found by visiting the library at 2000 Bennett’s Creek Park Road, calling 514-7150 or visiting www.suffolk.lib.va.us.