When I last wrote about our efforts to start an interprofessional book club on our campus in October, we were just about to have our first meeting to discuss three short stories. Since then, we have met two times, and we are currently planning our third and final meeting of the academic year.

The first meeting had a modest number of attendees, only three out of the 25 people who have signed up for the group. But the unexpected benefit of the small group was a more intimate and honest discussion about the short stories, and we received positive feedback about both the selection of short stories and the discussion group experience.

For the second round of book club, my colleague and I first solicited recommendations from the members of the book club for our next reading selection. We received one recommendation, and we used the NYU Literature Arts Database to decide on an additional two selections. We put these three options up to vote and ended up going with “Cutting for Stone” by Abraham Verghese.

We announced this new reading selection about two weeks before the winter break and planned to meet during the last week of January. This second discussion meeting also had a small turnout, with three attendees. And just like our first discussion, we had an excellent discussion about different themes and motifs from the novel.

For our third and final round of book club for the 2018-19 year, we are going to again provide three options for the members to choose from. To try to improve attendance, we are also going to ask members to select from a small number of potential meeting times for this discussion. I’m looking forward to this next discussion and can’t wait to provide another update!