Bulletin No. 1, 2015

Literacy Culture on and beyond Campus  11  as good as before. But the advantage is that the space is big. It can accommodate nearly 200 people. When a speaker spends several months to prepare for a talk, it is better to have 200 people than 30. The impact is different.’ Speakers of the Book Club are from highly diverse fields. Professor Leung invites potential speakers from the scholarly community, while Mr. Leung looks for book lovers in different sectors of society. He says, ‘We adhere to one principle: reading is for everyone. The serious and critical reading of books is not something exclusive to professors. When inviting speakers, we have one criterion in mind: that he or she has an insightful understanding of a book and is willing to share it with others. So, we’ve invited an engineer to talk about Su Shi, the Song dynasty poet. And as a lawyer, I once talked about a book by Edward Gibbon. These are reading interests unrelated to our work. We emphasize that a person should read widely beyond professional realms. That’s the idea of general education.’ At its gathering entitled ‘The Irredentist Yu- Yen Campaign’ in 2004, the Book Club had one of its youngest participants. A Form One student, Victor Lai was 14 and had a great interest in Chinese history. In an article for the Fifth Anniversary Brochure of the Book Club, he wrote, ‘Right after the talk, I told my family that I would join every talk of the Book Club…. I’ve never experienced in school such a way of communication. It’s so inspiring.’ Victor proudly says that he had 95% attendance in the early years though he joined less frequently later because of public exams. After that he has taken part in a wide range of book club gatherings, immersing himself in the sea of knowledge. The then book-loving teenager is now a university graduate. He is still a voracious reader who reads two to three books per week. He says, ‘Reading allows you to do impossible things like living other lives and travelling through time and space.’ He always carries a book with him so that he can read whenever he has time. He shares a tip with those people who think they are ‘too busy’ to read: ‘Read when you’re waiting for or travelling on public transport, when others play with their mobiles. This may add up to more than two hours per day.’ He thanks the organizers and speakers of the Book Club for their effort to promote reading. Besides the Book Club taking place in Central, the OUGE organizes book club gatherings on campus, which cater for CUHK students and secondary school students. It also holds book club meetings dedicated to the reading of classical texts for students of its General Education Foundation Programme. There are now 16 or 17 Book Club gatherings held in Central per year. For the Second Bookstore, the SCS and the OUGE, their preparation and organization are purely voluntary. Professor Leung says, ‘We see the Book Club as a community service. We don’t receive any funding for it. All participants do it of their own accord and for free. Our biggest reward is seeing people form a line to attend the Book Club.’