Whenever I hear someone say, “I belong to a reading group, and just recently we read and discussed [insert obscure book title here]…” I picture a group of effete people sitting around in plush armchairs in front of a roaring fire, pipes in their mouths and patches on the elbows of their smoking jackets, saying things like, “Oh yes, the symbolic abstraction of the personification of the protagonist is emblematic of the author’s objectivist motif.”
