KPU’s New Book Club: The Kwantlen Pageturners

Braden Klassen, Photo Editor

There’s a new club on campus that caters to KPU’s lovers of literature.

The Kwantlen Pageturners was founded earlier this summer by Amanda Grey, who hopes to foster a community for avid readers to come together and discuss literature with other like-minded people.

“There’s a certain bond that’s established when you are talking with someone about a book you both enjoyed or both hated,” says Grey.

While books have always been an important part of her life, Grey says she was dismayed to find that once she began taking English classes at university, she was no longer reading for fun.

“One of the things I’m hoping that this club will do for me and other students is give us an excuse to read for pleasure,” she says. “[It will provide] something where we don’t have to constantly have in the back of our mind, ‘Am I going to have to write an essay on this?’ and maybe open ourselves up to reading books that we might not have read before.”

The club is open to all student bibliophiles, regardless of their university major or taste in prose. At the beginning of the month, club members vote on which book to read via an online poll, and at the end of the month the group convenes to discuss the book and socialize. Instead of holding regularly scheduled meetings, Grey conducts online polls where members can vote on a meeting time that would work best for them.

The Kwantlen Pageturners have only had one meeting thus far, where the group discussed aspects of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The monthly book selection is largely influenced by members’ suggestions, but Grey also takes inspiration from researching other book clubs online.

“This is my first experience with a book club,” she says. “I’m relying a lot on the internet to say, ‘What are other book clubs reading, what are questions they are asking about these books, what are some tips I can get from other book clubs?’”

The club’s current reading selection for July is Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which was voted for on the club’s Facebook page. The page only has around 30 members currently, but Grey is optimistic that that number will grow over time and that the book club itself will continue to convene well into the future.