To promote library circulation and awareness of new acquisitions, the Thammasat University Library has launched a new Facebook page, Read-Ka-Ben.
Read-Ka-Ben features brief reviews in English of English language books of general interest recently acquired by the Thammasat University Library. These books may be useful for students and instructors, but may also be of interest to readers who are not in academia.
To find and follow the Read-Ka-Ben Facebook page, just click here.
In many cultures, reading is not something reserved for student days. As an article in Comparative Education in 1999 by Cheng Kai-Ming, Jin Xinhuo and Gu Xiaobo points out,
Lifelong learning was nothing unusual in the Chinese tradition. There was no age limit for education in ancient China, although education in those days was mainly for examinations, which were the testing ground for officials. A system of adult education was established in the 1 950s, but that was to complement the formal education system as an instrument to implement state manpower planning. Lifelong education as a modem notion was introduced to China only at the end of the 1970s immediately after the Cultural Revolution.
As the authors observe, education values in China were
fostered by the civil examinations held at the imperial court. The civil examination system lasted for around 1300 years from ancient China until the turn of the 20th century. The tradition set no limits to the modes or age of learning. Success in the civil examination was purely a recognition of the scholars’ efforts and talents, not even a test of their knowledge or skills. Study for the civil examination was a lifelong undertaking. Most of the scholars attempted repeated examinations and many of them were old when they succeeded. There were indeed awards to encourage elderly scholars, as a recognition of their unfailing will and effort to attempt the examination. The oldest candidate on record passed the examination at the age of 98 years!
While most readers of the Read-Ka-Ben Facebook page are younger than 98, the innovation of lifelong learning through fun reading is especially timely during the Novel Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, when international libraries have formed online book clubs to preserve contact with readers.
In addition, there have been academic research studies about book clubs in university libraries, notably one organized by the University of Washington Tacoma Library, the United States of America, and the University of Washington Tacoma Center of Equity and Inclusion.
The goal of this academic book club was to read and react to books about social justice.
Among the aims of the project was to support open access resources within the library community as a way to underscore the importance of resource availability.
Potential benefits to academic campuses of such book clubs are as follows:
- Building campus community by increasing empathy
- Creating closer connections to students, faculty, and staff over literature, which in turn may facilitate future library interactions
- Increase campus visibility through programming
- Highlight library services and programming, instead of library resources
Among international university libraries which have started book clubs is Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.
It has founded The Really Popular Book Club, described as
the new reading group hosted by Cambridge University Library. Everyone is invited to join us and our special guests to discuss a really popular book, one that we all know and perhaps or perhaps not love.
Each club meeting is held on Zoom, so there is no need to download any software, or register on Zoom. Students, instructors, staff, and other members of the Cambridge University community who wish to join in click on a link sent to them by email following registration for The Really Popular Book Club. Readers are then transferred to a web browser and receive a prompt to download Zoom. This invitation may be ignored, and instead readers scroll down to where a message reads, “If you cannot download or run the application, join from your browser.” They select the hyperlinked text “Join from your browser.” For those who already have the Zoom application on their computer or device, the link will open the club meeting automatically through the application.
It is not necessary to have read the book being discussed to be part of the discussion, since hearing interesting things about a book may motivate us to want to read it afterwards.
One example of a recent meeting was on 15 December 2020 when The Really Popular Book Club of Cambridge University met to discuss The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown:
The Really Popular Book Club is the new reading group hosted by Cambridge University Library. Everyone is invited to join our guest author to discuss a really popular book, one that we all know and perhaps or perhaps not love.
On Tuesday 15 December will be discussing the 2003 mystery thriller, The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. It’s a book about a coded message, with a preposterous view of academic research, a mangling of bible history, and has been called an attack on the Catholic church. And yet it was a massive hit. It’s sold over 100 million copies worldwide, was adapted into a Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks, and will be hitting the London stage in 2021.
We’ve chosen it because it marks the antithesis of our next exhibition Ghost Words: Reading the Past, an exploration of palimpsests – documents, often biblical texts, often 1000 years old or more, that were scraped clean and then written over. Ghost Words is about the meticulous reconstruction of these faint outlines, often combining painstaking academic research with advanced photographic techniques; the exact opposite of Brown’s pacy imaginings.
The guest author joining us to discuss the book will be Dr Sarah Dillon, Reader in Literature and the Public Humanities in the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of English. Sarah teaches and researches contemporary fiction and film, and has published and edited a number of books, including her first, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007) and her most recent, Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning (2021).
As well as hearing from Sarah about her thoughts and observations on The Da Vinci Code, we will once again be opening the floor up to you, our club members, to share your own observations and remarks.
Among other international university libraries to have initiated virtual book clubs is the Duke University Library in Durham, North Carolina, USA:
The Low Maintenance Book Club provides space for members of the Duke community to connect over reading. Realizing how busy people are (and how much reading you probably have to do for classwork and research), we focus on quick reads. We will read texts like short stories, graphic novels, interesting short essays, poetry, etc. We hope you will join us for some fun and thought provoking conversations!
Missing spring break? Take a literary trip with this month’s reading, Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence. This classic memoir chronicles the author and his wife’s first year after moving to France’s Provence region. As always, you’re welcome to join regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read the book!
Hardcover books and ebooks were made available to all participants.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)