Meta Book Club

Summary

This book club meets every 4-8 weeks in a MetaChat thread to discuss a book chosen from the Open Yale Course on The American Novel Since 1945. Aren't you glad we aren't responsible for writing any papers or taking a final exam?

The way this works is that you read the current book, read or watch or listen to the associated lecture by Professor Amy Hungerford or her guest lecturer, then join the MetaChat thread about the book.

Resources

Joining the book club is easy! Get yourself a copy of the current book and show up in the metachat discussion. That's it!

• The Syllabus
• All of the class sessions
• Bearwife is the current contact for questions or issues with the book club. Send her a memail if you'd like to be notified by email about upcoming discussions.

Current Book and Discussion Date

Our next -- and final book from the Open Yale syllabus -- is Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, along with two accompanying lectures by Prof. Hungerford. Come join us on March 16, 2012 to discuss!

Past Books & Discussions

• 09 March 2010: On Richard Wright's Black Boy [1]
• 21 April 2010: On Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood [2]
• 15 June 2010: On Vladmir Nabakov's Lolita [3]
• 16 August 2010: On Jack Kerouac's On the Road [4]
• 25 October 2010: On J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey [5]
• 06 December 2010: On John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse [6]
• 31 January 2011: On Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. [7]
• 07 March 2011: On Toni Morison's The Bluest Eye. [8]
• 26 April 2011: On Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior [9]
• 21 June 2011: On Marilyn Robinson's Housekeeping [10]
• 16 August 2011: On Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian[11]
• 09 November 2011: On Philip Roth's The Human Stain [12]
• 20 January 2012: On Edward P. Jones' The Known World [13]

History of the Book Club

This book club was started in 2009 by Shothotbot [14], and continued by bearwife [15]. Until we finish the current syllabus of the Open Yale course, book club choices will be drawn from it. After that, it would be great to choose other books to discuss.

A former MetaChat book club was run in 2006 by Eideteker. The booklist for that series was:

• Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell - Discussion - moderator: amberglow
• Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro - Discussion - moderator: oh pollo!
• At Swim, Two Boys, by Jamie O'Neill - moderator: rebirtha