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Suppose a snowstorm closes the college for a day, your classes are cancelled and you have hours available that you were not counting on. If you are one of those people who would react to that sequence of events by grabbing that book on your shelf that you have been waiting to tear into, then you should keep on reading -- on this page.

The Champlain College Book Club is for people exactly like you, and please don't think you are alone on this campus. Here's how it works. Keep on reading.

Every month we meet, probably on the first Tuesday of the month. Because we expect to sit for an hour or more, we make sure to reserve a room with comfortable chairs, the kind with lots of padding. Every month the group picks out a book, and please don't make the mistake of thinking that really the faculty moderator chooses it. That is not how it works, even though some students would probably like it better if I did things that way. The group has to find out about books and then report in on new findings. That same group then talks about why a proposed title sounds like a good choice, or not. Once we come to an agreement, which can take a good while, things have to happen fast. I call the biggest bookstore in town the next day and order as many copies as we need. The college pays, so those books become gifts to the members of the club. More often than not, the bookstore has to order the book because we need at least a dozen copies. When the books arrive, I pick them up and let everyone know they are in.

A month later, after everyone has read the book, we meet to talk about it. While we do that we also have coffee and cookies, also provided by the college. For a reason no one really understands, the people who make the cookies like us and always produce fresh ones for our meetings. Not bad.

Part of the aim of doing all of this is to read. But there are other parts, almost as important. The club is an excellent way to meet other students who have things in common with you, such as loving to read. Experience shows that some of the best discussions can happen when everyone does not love the book we have chosen. It means that we quickly move beyond the stage of "I loved it," and "I didn't like it very much," and get into spelling out exactly what we liked or did not. We talk about the authors a little, and talk about people we know who like books of this kind and why.

Another less obvious aim of being in the Book Club is to learn how to organize a Book Club. Right now, books discussion groups are being formed spontaneously all over the United States by grown- ups who graduates from college and don't want to stop reading and talking about books. Champlain students are being trained, even if they don't notice it, to be leaders in that kind of activity after they graduate from the college. But the important point is that it's a lot of fun and a good distraction from the stress of studies.

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