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Thursday, July 02, 2009
Reminder: Villette Reading Starts Next Week
Just a reminder: The Valve’s Second Annual Summer Reading Project, on Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, starts up on Tuesday, July 7. Discussion will open then for the first eight chapters. For the full proposed schedule, see here. (To review last year’s Adam Bede event, start here or here.) Last year’s was, overall, such a good experience that I propose adopting the same simple guidelines for our discussions this time:
1. Let’s be cautious about “spoilers.” Some of us have read the novel before, or have read enough about it to know the story. Others are new to it. I’ve found that opinions are often divided on the issue of “spoiler alerts.” Personally, I think it’s nice to allow other readers to enjoy suspense and surprises, especially in a long book when curiosity about what happens next can be both pleasurable and motivating. Others see little or no value in such deference to plot, or argue for the interpretive benefits of knowing key developments ahead of time. Perhaps we can compromise by alluding to events beyond the ‘assigned’ material obliquely or elliptically, if the occasion arises.
2. By all means let’s bring in critical or contextual knowledge from “outside” the novel if we think it bears interestingly on our reading. But let’s avoid doing so in a way that shuts down discussion--by, for instance, implying that everything we might think of to talk about here has already been said, and better, by others--or that we can’t talk intelligently about this book unless we’ve read 86 others.
3. It’s summer: let’s have fun and not be snarky.
As before, the pace or format of the weekly posts can be changed if a consensus emerges that we are going too fast, or too slow, or would benefit from better defined starting points for discussion, or whatever.
Hope to see you here on Tuesday!