Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The New Yorker Book Club

The New Yorker is jumping onto the book club bandwagon with a new online book club (or "readers’ coöperative" in New Yorker speak). During it's first non-beta month, the club is reading Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, which is receiving lots of attention these days thanks to a recent movie adaptation. Here's a rather bizarre explanation of the club from the site:

We plan to approach the books as landscapes for exploration, in which we are the park rangers, if you will, examining the flora and the fauna and fending off the occasional wild animal. (Every good book has one.) We hope you'll join us in this ongoing experiment, and lend your voices to the clamor.

3 comments:

Meytal Radzinski said...

I don't quite see how an online book club can even work. If it's online, that means that people from all over the globe can take part. However, people from all over the globe can't necessarily get the same books at the same time...

Zibilee said...

That club description is somewhat strange. I wonder why they decided to go with it? it just doesn't really work. I think I will have to pass on this club.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Zibilee - that description of the club is bizarre. Also, it reeks of trying too hard to be quirky, which bothers me. Meh, truth be told, I'm not really the hugest New Yorker fan as it is. Passing on this book club (which I'd imagine is just going to become huge and unwieldy anyway) is no big loss for me.