Happy new academic year! May it brings plenty of positive energy for teachers and students, and dispels all the dark clouds of anxiety and depression that plagued so many people last year.

My first post of this new year deals with my Department’s book club. We have been running a club for a few years now, but it has never really taken off. The format we have used so far has consisted of monthly meetings to discuss a different text chosen by one of the teachers in each session. In the last edition, coordinated by one of our doctoral students, we only managed to attract a handful of students, with some sessions left unattended. The school (the Facultat), however, wants to use our book club as a sort of beachhead to establish a larger book club, perhaps even of all UAB, so we are giving the club a new chance to prosper. Or die.

            For a variety of reasons, one of them being that I supported the foundation of the original club (it was Felicity Hand’s idea, if I recall correctly), I have been asked to coordinate it. For one ECTS a year. This is not that bad considering I was offered only 3 ECTS to coordinate a book club for the whole UAB, a daunting proposition that I rejected. I would like to note that, so far, the coordination and the sessions have been done for free. I had the crazy idea of thinking that perhaps I could coordinate the club and the students run the sessions, even choose the books, but in the end I see that I will have to lead monthly discussion, with the help of Honorary Professor Hand.

            Today, the local public libraries of Barcelona are opening the inscription process for their many book clubs, which run from the general to the specialized (in a genre, a national literature, an author and so on). There are eight English-language book clubs in the city, each with a different list of books. Here are a couple of examples (see the rest here):

  • October: Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  • November: Young Mungo, Douglas Stuart
  • January: Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  • February: Grand Union, Zadie Smith
  • March: 1984, George Orwell
  • April: Life & Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee
  • May: Our Kind of Traitor, John le Carré
  • October: The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • November: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
  • January: A Room with a View, E.M. Foster
  • February: The God of Small Things, Arundathi Roy
  • March: The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
  • April: The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
  • May: An Equal Music, Vikram Seth

            These two and the rest are beautiful lists, but although we have been using so far a similar literary approach and I was contemplating working further on the same direction, I have finally decided this is not what we need. All of these books can be potentially integrated into our Literature courses, and I believe that a main reason why the book club has not thrived so far is that students have considered our choices too close to our subjects. I am, therefore, trying a different approach.

            As happens, my niece, now a second-year student at UAB, asked me to please read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Reid Jenkins, because she wanted to discuss the ending and the friend who had recommended this very popular novel to her had not finished it yet. This is not a wonderfully written novel, like the ones in the two lists above, but I found it hugely entertaining and I realized that it raises plenty of issues for discussion. If, I told myself, my niece is a hard-working student with little time for extra reading and she has enjoyed this rather longish novel, then, this is what we need. So, starting with Hugo’s novel, I did a Google search of the most popular book club books in the Anglophone world, which essentially means the USA. And drew my own list.

            The GoodReads Book Club Books list is a good summary of all the lists that can be found online giving advice about which books work best for that context. As you can see, these are novels mainly by women, with moderate literary aspirations but with engaging plots, around 350 pages long (but they are total page-turners) and with plenty of issues to discuss, even if you don’t particularly love them as novels. They are not, in short, works to be admired as literature but novels to be enjoyed both alone and in communal discussion. While the books in the other lists I have reproduced can be a chore to read on top of all the other literary works which students need to read, this other type of book is refreshing and, in short, a break from high literature. This does not mean that the top titles for book clubs are all of them middlebrow rather than highbrow, but that middlebrow novels tends to dominate readers’ and coordinators’ preferences.

            On the basis of the lists I checked, then, I came up with a short list of 15 books, three of which are not fiction:

Of these, I have finally chosen six, a bit randomly: Ng, Daré, McCarthy, Michaelidis, Owens and Reid, and if this list works, then I already have nine more books to chose from for next year. As you can see, I had included one essay, a non-fiction narrative book and a memoir, but I have finally decided to focus only on novels. Incidentally, we have used short stories in previous editions of the book club, but this has not attracted more readers. I will add that that the book club meetings are in total seven, but I would like to begin with an initial general meeting and then move onto the novels. I was also told by the Department that six novels amounted to one and a half literature subjects, which is quite a lot if you consider the amount of reading from this point of view. The sessions are scheduled for the two-hour segments with no teaching that UAB keeps for extra activities.

            In the past, before the Bologna degree reform was implemented in 2009, we used to have ‘free-credit’ subjects, from one to three ten-hour credits. These ‘free’ credits were not attached to any degree and were offered by teachers interested in trying out small teaching experiments, or just plain bored with their usual workload. My university is considering bringing back that kind of credit, which would be ideal for the book club (I think three ECTS would be a good reward). As matters are now, we expect students to join the book club just for fun, which is a lovely but unrealistic concept. In the world outside our campus, plain readers do join book clubs for fun, but the students I know do not take any extra activities if they can help it, either because they work or because they are busy enough with their degrees. The task of setting up the book club is, then, nothing in comparison to the task of finding members and keeping them interested, for which I have no recipe. I considered rewarding the club members with extra points for class participation in a selection of literature subjects, but my colleagues told me that, anyway, the students most likely to join in would be the best students in their classes. They do not need extra points.

            Tired of this carrot-and-stick approach, I have grown increasingly convinced that perhaps the solution lies in being exclusive. In a situation in which most students openly declare they don’t like reading, I need to locate those who do read, and get them together, to make them visible. And proud. I told my Department that I would like to promote the book club with pins flaunting the slogan ‘proud reader’ and I might give this a try. The pin might be a conversation opener and an aid for student readers to meet. The rest is up to them.

            I’ll keep you posted, and let you know how the book club progresses. Or not.