Jenny Hartley, author of Reading Groups (Oxford University Press, 2001), reports that as many as 50,000 people in the UK and possibly ten times more in the USA currently belong to reading groups. It is also estimated that some 500,000 television viewers read the monthly selections from “Oprah’s Book Club,” launched in 1996 by US talk‐show host Oprah Winfrey. Book culture, then, appears to be very vital despite earlier predictions of its demise as a casualty of the electronic age. The popularity of the collective reading experience has been a boon to publishers, who are responding by creating free guides to facilitate discussion in groups reading mostly contemporary “literary fiction.” Reading group guides encourage the skills of critical reading in an audience eager to approach literature seriously.
ReadingGroupGuides.com gathers guides to books popular with reading groups, currently numbering over 800 with more guides added daily. The guides are provided by publishers and contain discussion questions on topics such as plot, genre, narrative form, thematic structure, historical context, and the psychology and motivation of the characters. They also typically include a brief summary and author biography, historical background, and suggestions for further reading. The site provides additional information from publishers to help groups choose what to read, such as blurbs of critical praise, excerpts from the text, and author interviews. Titles are presented in a manner similar to online bookstores, with a picture of the book and its publication details preceding the summary and discussion questions. Links to the publisher and to Amazon.com are provided as well.
The site as a whole is simply designed, and its overall feel is commercial yet homey. As “the online community for reading groups,” ReadingGroupGuides.com also offers readers an online newsletter, advice on starting a group and choosing titles, author and reader interviews, contests, and recipes. Guides are accessible by title, author, or category under the link “Find a Guide.” Categories include special interest areas such as African‐American, gay and lesbian, and women’s, along with award‐winners, bestsellers, several genres of fiction, biography and memoir, history and politics, non‐fiction and current events, “books into movies,” and, of course, “Oprah.”
Titles with the heaviest representation fall into the literary fiction, bestsellers, and non‐fiction and current events categories, reflecting publishers’ interest in providing reading guides as promotional tools for popular contemporary titles. Readers will find only a smattering of guides for classic titles by Faulkner, Cather, Nabokov, Kundera, and Garcia Marquez, and scarcely any for titles from the nineteenth century or earlier. ReadingGroupGuides.com is in this respect a highly commercial and somewhat limited resource. Since reading group guides are otherwise found in bookstores or by visiting individual publishers online, this site simply collects them all in one place. It is recommended for public libraries or those promoting recreational reading.
