Bookclubs battle summer heat and each other

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WHISTLER’S SUMMER BATTLEFIELD SEES CARNAGE AND COURAGE, AS PAPERBACKS ARE PITTED AGAINST HARDCOVERS AND ALL-MALE BOOKCLUBS TAKE ISSUE WITH JANE AUSTEN

Vicious Circle attempts peace-broking between rival factions at He Said, She Said: The Battle of the Bookclubs, September 11 2009  

August 3 2009 Whistler, BC –  While British Columbians confront a summer heat-wave steamier and smokier than any on record, the really bloody battlefields of the Sea to Sky corridor are currently the bookstores, libraries and reading salons wherein book-club members are assailing their summer reading assignments with a renewed assault.

In an effort to assuage tensions and re-engage diplomacy amongst those prone to hit the books to cope with summer, the Vicious Circle has drafted a voluntary Convention on Readers Rights and is seeking widespread endorsement of these Rules of Engagement from local leaders, librarians, booklovers, word-nerds and rabid book-group hosts.

Whereas the act of reading is often a solitary one, but it can sometimes be nice to get together with other humans and mutually discuss a book, we the undersigned agree that:

1. Readers have the right to gather together, under the pretext of discussing a book, and not really discuss the book much at all.


2. Readers have the right to declare their bookclubs to be all male or all female without breaching Canada’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms or being taken to the Supreme Court.


3. Readers are free to belong to more than one bookclub and to hold multiple alliances with, variously, the appreciators of trashy airport/beach fiction, advocates of the literary classics, and propagators of dense non-fiction tomes.


4. Readers, when discussing a book, should be willing to offer informed opinions, to agree to disagree, and if all intelligent thought fails, to like or dislike something “just because.”


5. The “just because” option is a ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card and should only be deployed sparingly.