Celebrating 63 Years
of Book Discussion Day April, 2026

Come all readers! The day-long event began in 1963 as an annual companion to Living Room Learning classes (now Off-Campus Studies) and then, as now, was intended to sharpen reading and discussion skills. From the beginning the format has been the same. The Book Discussion Day Committee, consisting of 15-20 members, reads and evaluates provocative books throughout the year, arriving at one book they feel will create lively and productive discussion on many levels. Attendees gather together, all having read the chosen book. Small groups are formed and Committee members facilitate a perceptive two-hour discussion. After lunch, everyone enjoys a lecture by a professor whose field of concentration applies valuable insights into the book. A question and answer period follows.

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The first discussions set the serious tone. In 1963, attendees read John Hersey’s The Child Buyer, followed by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Next came Albert Camus’ The Plague and following that Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Greek Passion. It is exciting to read the roster of notable books and their authors. We see a wide variety of stellar books whose subjects have ranged around the globe, written by the world’s most famous authors.Controversial books have never been avoided. In 2001 The Human Stain by Phillip Roth challenged readers to think outside the box. In 2002, attendees spent an energetic day discussing Italo Calvino’s collection of short stories Numbers in the Dark. Recently the book in drama form, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, asked the most of readers.Over the years, we presented authors who stand out in the annals of literature: Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, J.M. Coetzee, Iris Murdoch, Richard Powers, Toni Morrison, Jose Saramago, Amos Oz, Haruki Murakami, William Trevor, Alice Munro, to name just a few.

Courtesy of  Diana Vargo

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