Bibliophilia

The A.V. Club inaugurated a new literary feature this week, and if you were worried about the future of books and reading in this internet age, the results should give you hope. Editor Keith Phipps announced "Wrapped Up In Books" a month ago, and gave the readers our first selection: Katherine Dunn's 1989 novel Geek Love.

I'm honored that it was my pick that kicked off the book club. On Monday I posted my initial thoughts about the novel and asked A.V. Clubbers and the site's readers for their reactions. To our delight, hundreds of comments have been posted to that article and the five that followed from other staffers.

None of us knew whether our readers would really make the effort to obtain a twenty-year-old out-of-print novel and read it along with us. But they did, and by any standard, the discussion that they've generated has been fascinating and in-depth.

Tomorrow the feature will end for this month with a live chat on the site, incorporating live reader comments as well. You can join us at 5 pm Eastern, 4 central at http://www.avclub.com/features/wrapped-up-in-books/.

But thanks to an idea posted by an alert reader, and thanks to the indefatigable energies of our own Leonard Pierce, that won't quite be the end. I'll be interviewing Katherine Dunn on Friday for a feature that will appear as a postlude to the first "Wrapped Up In Books." I can't wait to get her responses to the questions that have been posed by our staffers and readers -- an inside glimpse into the novel we've been dissecting all week.

Our readers -- are readers. Guess we never should have doubted.