If you were to join only our planning sessions at the beginning of each semester, you might think that all book club members are passionate to the max about English literature (they are!), do nothing besides reading all day every day (they wish!), and would never let anything come between them and a book club discussion (they try!). We are passionate readers and discussants, but the reading plans we make are sometimes just slightly too ambitious—even for us.
It always gets especially tricky during the semester break. Members go on holidays, visit friends and family, and will have term papers to write somewhere in between. Getting a book read on top of that and making it to its discussion can become quite difficult. We get it. We have all been there…
This summer semester is actually quite paradigmatic when it comes to such problems. Both semester break sessions on The Female Man by Joanna Russ & Soft Science by Franny Choi (August 14, 2025) and on A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (September 11, 2025) have fallen victim to members’ holidays, alternative plans, and urgent deadlines and had to be rescheduled.
Cause for alarm? The beginning of the end of PADERBORN2READ—The English Book Club?
Probably not.
Sometimes life simply gets in the way of reading and discussing. But we deal with it by rescheduling, regrouping, and picking up where we left off as soon as we are slightly less busy and have found our way back to the reading schedule. Book club is not a reading challenge or competition, after all, but shared reading pleasure.
Please note that the discussion of A Wizard of Earthsea had to be rescheduled to the following week—September 18, 2025!
Please note that the discussion of The Female Man and Soft Science had to be rescheduled to winter term—October 23, 2025!
