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Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life, by Elizabeth Long. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 254 pp. $50.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-49261-3. $19.00 paper. ISBN: 0-226-49262-1.
In a world increasingly defined by mass media, we hear constantly of the death of the written word. Therefore it is refreshing to read Long's in-depth study of readers, Book Clubs. Long studied organized groups of women readers who live and meet in the Houston area. Exhaustively researched over a period of years, Book Clubs discusses in careful detail the way women's reading, and their discussions about it, help them to work out areas of conflict in their lives and particularly in their identities as women, or, as Long puts it, to "narrate the self." What role, she asks, does reading, and especially, talking about reading, play for women grappling with perplexing issues? Do books help to empower women as they write or speak their stories? These are the ambitious questions Long seeks to investigate in this impressive work.
In fact, Long argues, there are many different types of book groups that can play different roles in the lives of very different women. Some of the women in her study have remained in book groups that were organized when their children were...