The Official Southperry Book of the Month Club

I completely agree with both parts of your response being a Medical Microbiology & Immunology and English double major, but they're still not enough to ban a book from the list. If you're not willing to expend the effort required in obtaining some form of the chosen book SOMETIME DURING THE MONTH don't worry about participating that month.

 Spoiler

I'm not trying to sound exclusive towards people, and if it was anything other than a reading group I wouldn't make such comments, but come on. Seriously. It's not hard to get a classic within a month, and if you're capable of posting on a forum dozens of times a day you're capable of getting a copy of a chosen book. One person's lack of efforts will not affect the literature picked each month.

I don't see how it's unreasonable to just try and find books that are available online? Not everyone has the money to go out and buy/search for books and not everyone wants to go to the library. The internet is a vast resource filled with thousand of great books that most of us have probably never thought twice about, and it's clearly open to all of us. There's room for much more participation this way.

And how about instead of reading popular literature we just find e-books and pick the most interesting sounding one? Most of us have read Alice in Wonderland, or at least seen one of the reiterations in movie form. What are we gaining from that except a deeper understanding of something we're already pretty familiar with? I mean, I'm okay with reading that this month but I don't want to end up reading the same tired old stories every month. The best literary experiences of my life have come from just pulling a book from a shelf and digging in, and I'm sure this is a pretty common consensus (for those who have grown up reading, at least. I know kids today haven't really been forced to...)

I'm far more interested in reading obscure, adventurous, could-go-either-way finds than time-old safe ones.