Heeeeey y’all! We’re back to talkin’ about book clubs today as Ph.D. candidate Rebekah Ludolph shares her experience reading Hiromi Goto’s novel The Kappa Child (2001) in a book club that encourages the goal of reading to learn. At the same time, Rebekah complicates the idea of reading for “social change” and draws from her doctoral research to discuss the nuances, limitations, and possibilities in the act of reading.
Other topics of the episode include: types of readers and reading strategies; the labour of reading (and why reading is not, by itself, “the work” of social justice or social change); and book clubs as spaces of vulnerability in which we might bump up against unfamiliar or new ideas. If you’re a book club member, lover, or hater, I think you’ll want to listen to this chat!
- Order The Kappa Child (and Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun!) from your local bookstore. In Saskatoon, I like Turning the Tide and McNally Robinson.
- Read David James Hudson’s essay on anti-racism and “self-work” (which I refer to in the episode but could not remember the name): “The Displays: On Anti-Racist Study and Institutional Enclosure.”
- Rebekah refers to Larissa Lai’s Slanting I / Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s.
- Check out more information about, including the schedule of programming for, the One Book, One Province reading event.
- You can send a copy of Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun to someone who is incarcerated via Paul Seesequasis’s website, and there you can also make a contribution to the Indigenous Archival Photo Project. Also check out the APTN story/video featuring Paul Seesequasis.
The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain, whose work you can find here. The podcast graphics are by @muskrathands.
Email me at teachinbookspod@gmail.com or follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. I post extra content, like audiograms and behind-the-scenes stuff, on both accounts, more frequently on Insta, so follow me there for more teachin’ books fun!
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**Once available, the transcript for this episode will be here.**