Reading in Community

I’ve been thinking lately about the power of reading in community.  By that, I mean the process of reading something and then sitting down to discuss it with others who read it 

For most of us, our earliest reading happens this way, usually before we can decipher the words on our own. Our parents or grandparents read us a book, and we talk together about the pictures and the story.  It happens in kindergarten and first grade as we learn basic reading skills with our peers. In my childhood, it happened in Sunday School as the class read Bible passages or lessons from the Sunday quarterly and discussed them with our teacher. In high school, I remember learning to love Charles Dickens in sophomore English because we discussed it together—a chapter or three a day—in class.

In graduate school, I deepened my practice of reading in community. In graduate history seminars, homework involved reading a book (or two) or a set of articles, then dissecting it in class with our peers and our professor. We’d identify the author’s arguments, evaluate the evidence the writer marshaled to support those arguments, and then argue among ourselves about how well the author made his or her case. We often nitpicked, pretending to be much smarter than the scholars we were reading. The power of the process lay in how much we learned from each other. A classmate might say, “You know how the author said ____________.” And I’d say to myself (and sometimes, bravely, out loud), “Wait, she said that. I missed that! That puts things in a different light.” My classmates often brought totally different perspectives to the reading, helping me approach the content and the ideas with fresh eyes.

When I taught history, I loved repeating the process with my own students. We’d read historical documents together, and I always learned as much from their perspectives as I taught them. They learned how to question texts and assess arguments, but they also learned how to think more clearly and express their ideas in more lucid terms. In recent years, I’ve had similar experiences with the book groups I run for my coaching clients.

Book clubs are popular these days, another powerful venue for reading in community. My book club is full of smart and funny people ranging from their thirties to their seventies. Some are immigrants and others have lived all over the US and the world while others have never lived anywhere but South Carolina. Some are grounded in science, others in the humanities, and others in the social sciences. We read a lot of fiction and some occasional memoir or science writing. I read things I’d never have picked up on my own for book club, and I learn a lot from the perspectives the other members bring from their personal and professional lives.

Just before Thanksgiving, I collaborated with a thoughtful group of women to lead a conversation devoted to developing resilience in uncertain times. A group of folks ranging in age from nineteen to eighty sat together, read a selection from writer Margaret Renkl, and shared the thoughts the reading generated in us. As we unpacked that reading together, we learned from each other and about each other. We shared our strategies for staying healthy and sane as the world around us seems to be coming apart. Best of all, we also felt a little less alone.

These days, like everyone else, I sometimes spend more time reading my news feed and social media than engaging with ideas that have been expressed with more thought and care than I usually find in the digital arena. But I always feel better when I engage in real reading—whether that’s print books or magazines, ebooks or audiobooks. That experience of reading is even richer when I do it in community.

What about you? Do you like to read in community? What does that process do for you?  What’s your favorite memory of reading in community? I hope you’ll share in the comments.

P.S. Watch for my holiday post on my favorite reads from this year.