Gillian: Every two months or so, in a London suburb, a group of women have a meeting. They laugh a lot, talk excitedly and sometimes disagree quite strongly with each other. Every few days a 12-year old boy goes on the internet and writes a story about the character from his favorite children’s novel. Within a few days, other children, all over the world, have read his chapter on the internet.
Both the 12-year old and the group of women have something in common -they all enjoy reading books, and they want to share this pleasure and delight with other people. The women are part of a reading group; the boy is making use of a fan fiction website that encourages people to write stories about their favorite fictional characters.
It’s often been said that reading a book is like having a conversation. And it seems that many people want to continue that conversation once they have read the book. Reading groups are one way of doing so. Typically, a reading group consists of six to twelve members who meet regularly to discuss a book they’ve all read. Reading groups take place in private homes, in libraries, in chatrooms on the internet. Reading groups read contemporary novels or the classics. And reading groups may even specialise in science fiction or romance, haiku or the crime novels of Dick Francis.

So why such enthusiasm for reading? A lot of reading we do is for information - to find out the times of a train, to discover what’s on a menu. But we also read because it satisfies our need for a good story. We try to make sense of our world by reading stories about it. In the past, reading was often a more social activity than it is today - those who could read, read aloud to those who could not, and everybody shared the stories. Stories which gave insights into the mysterious complexities of human experience.
So perhaps that’s why reading groups are so popular today. They enable people to share stories, and to see how other people’s responses to a story differ from their own. And from this sharing of stories, people form common bonds of friendship and community
Gary: Gillian Lazar, thank you. Next time, we’ll be finding out how to be a good
“book detective”!