The book club announced its annual reading challenge this week: twelve books over the school year, chosen freely — but ten of them must each open a different “door,” a category designed to pull readers out of their usual genre with the minimum necessary force.
The ten doors
- A book translated from another language
- A book published before you were born
- A book recommended by someone who dislikes your favourite genre
- A book of poetry (yes, a whole one)
- A book about a subject you know nothing about
- A book you abandoned once and swore about
- A book under 150 pages
- A book over 500 pages
- A book by an author from your family’s region
- A book you choose by its first sentence alone
The remaining two books are free choices, “because,” as the announcement puts it, “we are a book club, not the police.”
Last year’s challenge had 60 finishers of a much simpler list. Club president Dario Bianchi expects the doors to cut that number and considers it worth it: “The feedback that mattered wasn’t ‘I finished.’ It was ‘I would never have picked this up and now I’m rereading it.’ The doors are built to manufacture that accident on purpose.”
Participants track their reading on a shared shelf in the library, where a wall display will fill in over the year. The club meets fortnightly, and — by firm tradition — discussing a challenge book at a meeting counts even if you have not quite finished it. “We are, again, not the police,” said Bianchi.
The doors have a history
Several categories carry scars from past challenges. “A book you abandoned once” exists because last year’s most animated meeting was an unscheduled argument about giving up on books — the club’s eventual position, now semi-official: abandoning a bad book is self-respect, but abandoning a hard one deserves a second attempt. The poetry door survived a motion to remove it by a single vote, and its defenders have promised a starter list “for the sceptical,” to be pinned beside the library shelf display.
The library is a formal partner for the first time this year, with a dedicated challenge shelf stocked against the ten doors — including, the librarians note with visible pride, a poetry section curated “for people who are sure they hate poetry,” assembled by the same staff member who has now converted four such people and keeps count.