ABSTRACT
The examples considered in previous chapters suggest that reading group talk is not simply a sharing or summation of members’ prior individual readings. Group members do offer individual readings of the book under discussion. We mentioned in Chapter 1, for instance, that some groups begin with individual views of the book. However, they also work together during the meeting to construct more collaborative literary readings that are contingent upon the interactional setting in which they take place. In this respect, reading group talk is better considered a distinctive readerly act rather than ‘talk about reading’. Two significant aspects of this type of reading are, first, that it is social and, second, that it is a jointly constructed interactive activity—we refer to this here as co-reading. In combination, these features seem to be the essence of reading groups, whose members come together to reconsider, in the group, books they have initially read in private.
