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

The next book club discussion will be on Marilynn Robinson's Housekeeping [1], along with two accompanying lectures by Prof. Hungerford, and the discussion will go up in MetaChat on June 21. About a week later there will be a thread about which book we should read next, and for what date we should plan our next discussion.

Past Books & Discussions

• 09 March 2010: On Richard Wright's Black Boy [2]
• 21 April 2010: On Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood [3]
• 15 June 2010: On Vladmir Nabakov's Lolita [4]
• 16 August 2010: On Jack Kerouac's On the Road [5]
• 25 October 2010: On J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey [6]
• 06 December 2010: On John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse [7]
• 31 January 2011: On Thomas Pynchon's Lost in the Funhouse. [8]
• 07 March 2011: On Toni Morison's The Bluest Eye. [9]
• 26 April 2011: On Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior [10]
• 21 June 2011: On Marilyn Robinson's Housekeeping [11]

History of the Book Club

This book club was started in 2009 by Shothotbot [12], and continued by bearwife [13]. If you'd prefer to jump ahead to another book in the syllabus, feel free to raise that in a discussion thread here in MeCha. If there is a dispute, majority vote wins. Until we finish the current syllabus of the Open Yale course, however, 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 - moderator: oh pollo!
• At Swim, Two Boys, by Jamie O'Neill - moderator: rebirtha