It’s an experiment maybe. Get together a brilliant university staff member, a dozen sparkling third year undergraduates and a dozen retired people of various levels of education. Give them a reading list of books so varied that no-one has read them all already and see what they make of them.
Is that a fair representation of what we are doing?

I have a way of reading a new non-fiction book that’s a result of choosing books for a public library in a past career:
1. scan through it quickly to see its structure and ease of understanding,
2. pick a short section I can understand and read it
3. read the whole thing, looking up words and references I don’t understand (there was rarely time to do this as a librarian!)
4. make notes on anything I want to take from it.

James Wood (2015) The Nearest Thing to Life. Jonathan Cape. isbn 9780224102049 was the first week’s book.

I took it at first sight to be an autobiography, as there are childhood and youth anecdotes illustrating many points, and chose the section about his ‘unedifying girlfriend’ (p6) as a good starting place. I had to look up ‘unedifying’. I was reassured that the book was accessible enough to understand its contents. Falsely reassured, though, because although I can begin to grasp the concepts of serious noticing and secular homelessness, I am far from doing so. I have read some of the books referred to in the text, but not many. The quote from John Berger (p. 45) was the first clue I had to start thinking about the meaning of Wood’s text, and I have read some John Berger and read more about art than literature.
I have one note from this first full reading: that a text necessarily assumes some knowledge of its subject on the part of the reader, and the writer must provide enough hooks to what a reader may already know. Still thinking about some other ideas.
I would not have chosen to read this book had it not been on the list, nor would I have chosen it for my library unless it had been requested by a reader

I am in various stages of reading the other set texts, and I am also looking at W.G.Hoskins Two Thousand Years of Exeter, rev ed 2004, to learn something of my new home town; and Gordon C. Fisher, Blender 3d basics 2012, which is about a computer drawing program.

John Stafford