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For many of us, it’s as fundamental as breathing. Read on to find out how Oklahoma sates its reading appetite, from organized, state-sponsored programs to home-based book clubs galore.

Reading, as most avid consumers of the printed word know, is a soul-sustaining activity, the reward for which is the experience itself. For staunch bibliophiles, there is little substitute for the interactive cerebral process of cognitively making meaning as the eye scans the page.

As the twenty-first century unfolds with its multiple media, high-speed Internet, and modern distractions ranging from iPods to MTV to instant messaging, reading may be more important than at any time in the modern era, at least in part because the world presents such a range of high-tech distractions competing for our ever more limited free time.

In July, the National Endowment for the Arts presented the results of an exhaustive study of three decades of American reading habits. The news is not good, with total book reading declining 7 percent and literary reading plummeting 14 percent between 1992 and 2002. According to the report, 57 percent of the country’s adults read a book of any kind in 2002, 47 percent of adults a work of literature. Experts fear those numbers may sink even lower.

Kyle Dahlem, director of teacher education and the Minority Teacher Recruitment Center for the Oklahoma State Regents of Higher Education, is a member of the Task Force on Reading, Curriculum, and Instruction mandated by Senate Resolution 70, passed last legislative session. This fall, the group will be studying reading instruction in Oklahoma.

A native Oklahoman and daughter of a Methodist minister who has taught and worked as a library media specialist in Fairview, Geary, Ceiling, and Moore, Dahlen is a passionate defender of reading’s role in modern life, believing that one vital difference between nonreaders and readers is the choice between being consumers of others’ information or masters of their own.

"If you read, you can think for yourself," she says. "If you don’t read the 9/11 commission report for yourself, you have to be told about it, and then you may or may not be getting the real story or the real information. Critical thinking skills are vital in the kind of world we live in, and those are developed from reading skills. Being able to comprehend what you read means being able to make informed decisions."

Oklahomans are fighting the good fight on behalf of reading and books, and book groups are a big part of the arsenal. In a study entitled America’s Most Literate Cities, released in early August, Tulsa and Oklahoma City ranked twenty-first and thirty-ninth among the nation’s cities with populations over 200,000. Although no one knows the exact numbers, thousands of Oklahomans express their love for reading in ongoing book discussion groups. These groups—formal and informal, women-only, men-only, and mixed; self-directed and following a format developed by others; library-, home-, church-, or bookstore-based, even online—fill a variety of needs, some basic, some more esoteric.

Susan McVey, director of the Oklahoma Department of Libraries and a member of an Oklahoma City-based book group that has been meeting for more than twenty years, has a few theories about the appeal of book groups. "Many people crave the type of intellectual exchange that comes through discussing materials often reflecting their own personal experience," she says. "In addition, people want a way to connect. They may be active in public life, involved in civic clubs or volunteer groups, but they don’t often have the luxury of sitting down to talk about something that’s important to them or that’s moved them."

The particular ways book groups can accommodate the basic human need for connection and the loftier goal of providing an excuse for intellectual exchange are as many and varied as book groups themselves. In the interest of simplification, two broad categories of such groups exist: those affiliated with a larger program or facility that provides supplemental and organizational materials, selects the book, or both; and home-based collections of book-lovers. Of the latter type, many took their lead from Oprah Winfrey’s book club, which began in 1996, disbanded for ten months in 2002, then was redefined as a classics-only group in February 2003.

Organized book-related programs, by design established to encourage citizens to read, have been cropping up around the country for the past several years.

In 1997, former Oklahoma resident Nancy Pearl, then executive director of the Washington Center for the Book, was curious about what might happen if Seattle residents read the same book at the same time. She wrote a successful grant that inspired other cities and states to jump into the fray. Today, organizations in all fifty states and the District of Columbia conduct some 254 offshoot programs. Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma is the Sooner State’s version of what unofficially has become known as the One Book, One State initiative.

An Oklahoma Centennial Project, Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma kicked off last year with a statewide vote on the first "literary six-pack" of Oklahoma-flavored books. Billie Letts’s The Honk and Holler Opening Soon was the winner, and since January, groups of readers have been gathering in libraries, classrooms, and homes to talk about it. Honk and Holler study guides are available on the Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma website, okreadsok.org; the state’s education department provides curriculum guides for high school teachers; and discussion group facilitators are available through the Oklahoma Humanities Council. The contest will continue with six new titles competing for the popular vote each fall through 2007, Oklahoma’s centennial.

The 2005 winner will be announced in November. This summer, the Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma steering committee announced its nominees: Ralph Ellison: A Biography by Bob Burke and Denyvetta Davis, Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie, Letter from Home by Carolyn Hart, Letters from the Dust Bowl by Caroline Henderson, University Boulevard by A.B. Hollingsworth, and Walking the Choctaw Road by Tim Tingle.

According to McVey, the selected titles have one thing in common: the Oklahoma experience. "We often underestimate the importance that Oklahoma has played in writers’ imaginations," she says. "The major thrust of this project was to identify books that were easy to discuss and to reflect on what it means to be an Oklahoman."

But Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma is a new kid on the block compared to Let’s Talk About It, Oklahoma. In existence since 1985, the program is an Oklahoma Library Association and Oklahoma Humanities Council-sponsored reading and discussion series for adult readers. Available to any nonprofit in the state, typically public libraries, for a $100 fee, Let’s Talk About It, Oklahoma offers thirty-four modules centered on discussion of four to six books within a central theme. The program provides a directory of scholars, borrowed books for participants, discussion training for facilitators, and posters and other publicity materials.

Many of the eight- to ten-week programs include Oklahoma authors (Tony Hillerman’s The Ghostway, for instance, in Private Investigations: Hard-Boiled and Soft-Hearted Heroes and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn in Many Trails, Many Tribes: Images of American Indians in Fiction). Several themes fall under the Oklahoma Experience category, and indeed, many of the Let’s Talk About It themes, says program director Dr. Jennifer Kidney, were home-grown, devised by Oklahoma scholars.

Kidney notes the program’s growing success. Every year, some forty to fifty sites present one Let’s Talk About It program or another, and nineteen programs are scheduled this fall alone.

"We’ve been everywhere," says Kidney, who holds a PhD in English from Yale. "I keep getting requests from cities all over the state. It’s a good way for a community interested in doing a book discussion to get the idea of the concept. That’s where the Let’s Talk About It concept comes from—it’s kind of an improved book club, because you have a speaker who can answer questions about the author, the meaning, and the historical significance. But then the small group discussion still exists, and that’s wonderful."

The rugged individualism so central to the Oklahoma experience leads impressive numbers of readers to take the book by the spine and start their own groups. Dr. Beth Leader, a family practice physician and founder of the Precious Jewels book club, is just such a forge-your-own-path thinker. "We have no rules," she says of the nineteen-member group of primarily professional women living in Antlers and Hugo. "I hate rules. I don’t want any. Whoever is hosting can do whatever they want to do."

That may not come as a surprise to anyone who’s heard about their elaborate meetings. During a discussion of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, three members initiated a theme party with members arriving in costume after receiving an "owl-posted" invitation addressed to "Dear First Year Jewel." Another appropriately spooky meeting on Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was held at a remote cabin in the woods. The refreshments? Sack lunches similar to the protagonist’s minimal rations but with an upper-crust twist: Rather than the boiled egg in the book, these lunches included deviled eggs with caviar.

Another small-town but high-powered book club, the Beta Bookies, meets in Eufaula and Checotah under the gentle guidance of founding member Wilmatine Griffin. In 2001, Griffin retired from her position as a full-time instructor at Connors State College in Warner.

"I couldn’t live without reading," says Griffin. "You have to read to be emotionally stable." A lifetime of teaching English, composition, and creative writing had made literary discussion habitual, and Griffin wondered what would fill the empty space. A book group, she thought, might be just the thing.

Griffin, long a member of Beta Sigma Phi, an international women’s friendship network, first offered the idea of a book club to fellow members of the Checotah chapter. By 2002, ten had joined. All remain active today.

"We really get into deep things in our group," says Griffin. "Everybody can just open up. There’s a feeling of safety. We can disagree, vehemently sometimes, but still, we know it’s all right. Nobody ever holds any grudges."

Indeed, the group has become so bonded that most of its members travel to Europe together every March, part of a larger travel group Griffin coordinates. But the closeness doesn’t stop at book talk and travel. Adeline Adamek, an RN-turned-financial representative for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, says the Beta Bookies enjoy a special relationship.

"In book group, people have revealed things about themselves, intimate things about their lives. One person might be the one who starts it, maybe mentions something, and then other people say, ‘Well, I’ve felt that way too.’ That’s the beauty of it; you’re talking about something that was a very secret part of yourself that maybe you haven’t told anybody. It’s pretty special when you can get to that level of friendship."

Through it all, Griffin leads every discussion with a light touch, standing when necessary. Occasionally, she taps a fork on a glass to get the group’s attention. "I kind of keep them at bay when they have disagreements," she says. Griffin has tried unsuccessfully to pass the baton to other group members. "They keep saying, ‘Oh, but Wilmatine, you do such a good job!’"

They may not have a leader, but for Readers’ Circle, a Tulsa-area group of professional women meeting over the past ten years, leaderless in no way suggests unorganized.

"Somehow I’ve kind of morphed into the record-keeper in our group," says Cindy Hulsey, by day the training and development coordinator at the Tulsa City-County Library. For this fiction-only group, Hulsey’s duties include tallying and ranking votes for each of the year’s twelve books (the members start each meeting with a thumbs up, thumbs down, or thumbs sideways vote on the book to be discussed) and tabulating the results for the group.

Readers’ Circle meets every January to plan the entire year’s book list, selecting the twelve highest vote-getters from a larger list of recommendations from members, then deciding who will host each monthly meeting and which book will be up for discussion that night. "We are pretty darned organized," says Hulsey. "I think that’s one reason why we’ve been together so long. When you have this syllabus in front of you, you feel like you’re committed for the whole year."

LeeAnna Weaver, also a library professional working for Union Public Schools in Tulsa, founded Readers’ Circle in 1995, the year before Oprah’s book club began. Over the years, she has learned the special give-and-take a book group offers.

"When I was growing up, my parents played cards—canasta or pinochle—or just had people over to visit," she says. "I don’t think people do that anymore. To me, our book group is stepping back into that kind of leisure that engages your mind—and it doesn’t involve electronics or television or video. We just sit and talk with one another, and we bring our own experiences to the table and our own wisdom."

Hulsey believes the collective experience has a particularly feminine benefit. "I think when women read a book, they bring their personal experience to it, and they can’t really separate themselves from what they’re reading. Book groups give us a way to express what’s going on in our emotional and intellectual lives in a way that we might not be as free to do if we didn’t have that sort of conduit or that platform."

It has been said that women tend to be emotional, men rational. In other words, women are feeling creatures who filter their experiences through their emotions, while men are thinking creatures who filter their experiences through facts. One Oklahoma City book group of male attorneys who have been getting together for more than two years seems to bear out—at least in part—the truth of those theories.

"This is a book club that’s an excuse for discussions about ideas," says Art LeFrancois, a law professor at Oklahoma City University. But that doesn’t translate to lack of emotion. "In our group, there is real passion connected with ideas, attacks on ideas, and defenses of ideas. We want to think the ideas we have and defend are products of nothing but our reason. These are unemotive, passionless, correct, logical, geometric. And yet when you get below and figure out exactly why it is that you have the particular reaction against this or that idea, sometimes what you find is an attachment that at bottom is emotional."

Each of the members is a genuinely smart guy having a very good time. Terms like eschatology, alchemy, Cartesian vortices, and post-Nietzschean travel rapid-fire around the room, and everyone present seems to understand them.

Rob Ramana, senior law clerk for a federal appeals court judge, says, "These are some of the smartest people I know. And yet there’s no sense of feeling intimidated by that. That’s a bit unusual, to have such high-powered people but also people who really enjoy one another. The group is a great vehicle to rekindle interest in that experience of sitting around and talking about books and ideas and politics and philosophy."

He recalls a recent meeting at his Crown Heights home, when the group discussed Oklahoma-raised Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America until around 11:30 p.m. At midnight, Ramana, cleaning up, glanced out the window and saw Andy Spiropoulos and Barry Johnson out in the street, talking. At 12:30, he checked again. The two were still debating against the dim illumination of the streetlight. "My wife is sort of appalled at how long these discussions go on," he says, laughing.

But it’s all good, clean, fun—albeit with a political science twist. "We’re all sufficiently nerdy to take these books seriously and to care about them," says LeFrancois, who presides over "Art’s Infelicity Corner" at every meeting, pointing out each of the author’s faux pas he’s managed to ferret out. "But to be sure, there’s a laugh factor. It’s just plain fun. We do some fairly loud discussing, but the great thing is that everybody respects one another, and everybody knows that at the end of the evening, the only thing we’re going to be doing is looking forward to the next time we get together and discuss another book."

And so it goes in the world of Oklahoma book groups. Every meeting must come to an end. Members gather their things and leave, only to reconvene another time, another place, for another book.