How to Keep Your Postgraduate Mind Sharp: Join a Book Club!

If you’re not careful, your mind can easily go downhill after college. It shouldn’t be surprising; even if you’re jumping into a career right out of college, everything you learn from then on has to do with your specialization. If you don’t deliberately challenge your mind to work in different ways, you’ll get so used to your daily routine that every other part of your mind will enter a state of atrophy. Upkeep is very important and can be done through various methods. One of these methods is to join a book club.

The term ‘book club’ usually comes with a lot of baggage. I know when I hear it, I imagine a troop of bored housewives sitting around their local Starbucks weekday mornings after they’ve dropped off their kids at school, killing time together by offering their empty insights on the latest Nicholas Sparks novel. I get bored myself thinking about joining in on such aimless discussion, but this scenario is not ideal. I would gouge out my own eyes before joining a group like that.

I may be biased as an English major, but to me, the written word isn’t given a fair shake in terms of societal clout. I’ve spent my college days agonizing over homework reading assignments, learning to hate books solely because they were assigned. I made myself read them and there was little to no enjoyment in the process. And yet, when I thumb through the books now, I finally understand why they were assigned in the first place. They are all influential pieces of literature, inspired books that greatly impacted the society at that time.

So why is it that the regular person rarely touches a printed word apart from a magazine, if even that? Why is it that we read and write more in our instant message windows in a month than we’ve read and written in the last couple of years? Why is it that we can spend our days absorbing gigabyte after gigabyte of digital data but leave tome upon tome of literature untouched? Why is it that print is considered to be dead?

If you want to keep your mind active, a book club is one way to go. Not your mom’s book club, but a book club nonetheless. A real book club is a gathering of likeminded individuals determined to expand their worldview through a communal experience of the written word and an active discussion of various themes in the books that affect you, in the here and now. You’ll learn to discipline yourself to read to a schedule, analyze the book in terms of relevant themes and verbally express your ideas. I know it’s not for everyone, but give it a try. You might be surprised how much you’ll get out of it.

The beauty of joining a book club is that you’re not doing it for any teacher, any reading assignment or any research paper. You’re completely doing it for yourself and for that reason, you receive much more insight from the literature. If you can’t find one to join, create your own. It doesn’t have to be too formal. In fact, it’d probably be easier for you to create a comfortable environment if you put the group together yourself. There are tons of resources out there designed to help you get started. Check out BBC’s Top 100 books. If you’re like me, you haven’t read them all so figure out a book you want to start on with your friends, buy it and just do it! My friends and I just finished Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild last week, and we watched the movie this past weekend. We all really enjoyed the whole experience. Next up: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and hopefully we’ll be able to catch Tim Burton’s creepy take on Alice in Wonderland early 2010.

What are some of your book recommendations for a book club? Maybe your book will be next on our list!