Reading groups and book clubs are an important contemporary cultural practice, providing a window on the everyday interpretation of literary texts. While reading is often considered a solitary process, reading groups constitute a form of social reading where interpretive activity is produced and displayed in discourse. This book investigates the language of reading group meetings from a number of complementary linguistic and interactional perspectives, addressing a range of literary, social and discursive phenomena. Unlike traditional cognitive studies, the focus of this volume is on real readers engaging in a habitual reading activity. The authors observe texts that are the subjects of discussion, and various meta-texts that may be draw on by readers. As reading here is seen as a social activity, the volume explores the construction of particular reader identities across a range of reading contexts, at both individual and group level. It sheds new light on the rich and complex nature of this type of literary interpretation and social interaction around books, and will be of interest to scholars in literacy studies as well as stylistics, applied linguistics, digital technologies and educational research."