Students curl up with a good book
Last year, a group of USU students discovered that campus had no official book club. Instead of just sitting back, they took initiative and created their own.
Through Honors 2000, an online class for freshman Honors students, a group of new students discovered they shared a common interest. Within the class forum, they were able to hold discussions and the subject kept coming back to books. It took off from there.
“We just kept asking about favorite books,” Whittney Olsen, president of the club, said. “[So] we just got the requirements from ASUSU, wrote a club constitution, then met every week and talked about books.”
Other productions to get the club up and running were undertaken during the first few weeks, she said. A Web site was set up to discuss the club’s endeavors at www.usubookclub.proboards7.com. Here members can post announcements, talk about books being read and anything else they felt like discussing.
They also needed to decide upon a name. The club was dubbed Aggie Zealots for Literature, but Olsen said it all began with a search for a great acronym.
“Someone wanted us to be D.U.C.K.S. I don’t remember what it stood for.”
Eventually, it boiled down to what the club was actually about. They also still got their acronym by shortening the title to AzLit.
Olsen explained that “Aggie” was chosen to honor the school mascot, “literature” because that is what they would be meeting to discuss and “zealots” because the word refers to somebody who is enthusiastic about their cause.
With the technical details squared away, the club was ready to start reading. Olsen says they will read anything anyone suggests. “We read ‘Ender’s Game’ and then ‘Dracula for Halloween.’ Our goal is to read one book a month.”
Once the club was up and running, operations seemed to go quite smoothly.
“The biggest problem,” Olsen said, “was finding enough copies of the same book for everyone.”
And even though the club is all about literature, Olsen stressed the club is supposed to be a fun way to meet people who share common interests.
“It may have started as Honors [students], but it’s for everyone and anyone,” she said.
The club goal is “Just to bring together teachers, students and community members who enjoy reading,” Olsen said.
They also try to maintain a friendly atmosphere, but “some books [create] strong feelings,” she said. Olsen recounted a meeting in which several members deemed some books were “burn-worthy,” but one member firmly insisted that you should never burn books.
Club members also expressed interest in other aspects of literature. So, although reading is the main purpose for the club, creative writing was also included on a list of things to do. For their Halloween party last year, the members participated in a writing round robin, Olsen said.
But for the most part, she said the club focuses on group discussion. “We have some pretty interesting conversations,” Olsen said. “Once there were only two of us at a meeting and we debated whether or not the universe was a box.”
She hopes that if enough interest is generated, the club can become larger and more diverse. “We decided if we got larger that we could split into groups – science fiction, classics and more,” she said.
The idea would be to allow students to choose whichever genre they enjoyed the most, Olsen said, and join discussions and readings of those books.
The first meeting for Aggie Zealots for Literature for this academic year will be held Thursday, Oct. 6 at 6 p.m. in the Hub on the first floor of the TSC. Olsen urged everyone to come and bring suggestions, “This year hopefully [we’ll] get to see more things happen.” For information concerning the club contact Whittney Olsen at whittols@cc.usu.edu.
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