Can a College Classroom be a Reading Zone? is an intriguing blog post. I often talk about the necessity of giving students the cultural background they need to understand a work… This post (and the book it refers to) discusses having the students learn the background themselves through reading.
The idea of the Personal Narrative as a book club is fascinating. I am going to suggest it to my colleague who teaches the equivalent of this class at my SLAC.
I could see doing this for a century of reading. An 18th century British Literature course could have two or three common texts and a list of choices. I think that would be phenomenal!