To Start A Book Club?

As busy English majors, it can be overwhelming to think of the exhaustive list of literary classics that we feel we must read. And each year, new books are released that capture the attention of the literary world and seem to only make that list even longer. When selecting books to read outside of class, where do we begin? And without the guidance of literary experts (our professors), will we be doing it wrong?

To alleviate these problems, our chapter has decided to start a book club. As a group, students can read a selected book, then discuss it in a book club meeting. After a vote, STD members chose a diverse group of eight books to read together during the 2010-2011 school year, including classics such as Lolita, Wuthering Heights, and Pride and Prejudice, contemporary favorites such as The Kite Runner and The Alchemist, the poetry collection The Stranger Manual, and one young adult novel, Shiver.


The first book club selection is this year's Sigma Tau Delta Common Reader, Lorene Carey's Black Ice.

A tentative schedule of the reading order and due dates:

1. Black Ice by Lorene Cary - Sept. 8th
2. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - October 13th
3. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini - November 12th
4. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - December 3rd
5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - February 9th
6. The Stranger Manual by Catie Rosemurgy - March 16th*
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë - April 15th
8. Shiver by - April 29th*
*date has been changed