Starting on Thursday, December 5th at 6:00 PM, the Reading Club of the Insular Library of Lanzarote (42 Rambla Medular in Arrecife) will begin its journey, coordinated by Language and Literature teacher Yolanda Ruano Laparra and myself. I feel a tremendous excitement for this project and what it signifies, for the effort that the Cabildo and the Insular Library have made to offer this activity to the reading public. But above all, I feel great satisfaction in sharing this project with Yolanda Ruano because she is one of the most enthusiastic and hardworking people I know. I have had excellent colleagues throughout my years of teaching in Lanzarote, but I can assure you that the passion for literature and our language, and the enthusiasm and love for teaching and her students that I have seen in her, is truly extraordinary.
From the coordination of the Reading Club, we have tried to prepare an interesting work program that will cover from this month of December until June 2025. During that time, we will hold a bi-weekly meeting for the readers. In a first monthly session, we will present the books we are going to read, as well as a sketch of the author, paratexts, and reading guides for each of the works to facilitate their understanding and provide the Club attendees with tools to perform a textual comparison exercise. We will also begin to conduct a shared reading. After two weeks, we will meet again to share ideas, concerns, and discuss the expectations and conclusions that the reading has offered.
Regarding the reading program itself, we have tried to make it varied, with classic readings from the 19th and 20th centuries, of short or medium length, and that address the different literary genres and authors of diverse origins, organizing everything around a theme. In this way, we wanted to dedicate December to metaliterature. The selected reading book will be Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In January, the theme will be the anti-hero, and the book to read will be Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In February, the protagonist will be magical realism, and we will read Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. We will dedicate March to the visualization of the work of female writers, and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf will be the main reading. April will be about lyric poetry, and we will enjoy The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, one of the peaks of 20th-century poetry. May will be dedicated to Canarian literature, and we will address a fascinating novel from our letters: Fetasa by Isaac de Vega. Finally, June will be dedicated to the dramatic genre, and we will read The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov.
We would like the Reading Club of the Insular Library of Lanzarote to be an open place, remembering, in the words of Manuel Rodríguez Rivero, that a public library is a radically democratic place. We want it to be a meeting space for people who love books and reading, and for people of different ages and backgrounds to participate, and for it to become, in short, a place of enjoyment, exchange, and learning around literature. We invite you to come and participate, to be part of this exciting project.