Twitter book club

http://twitter.com/#!/1book140: Click on this and enter a book club on Twitter, which has a global following of over 66 thousand and into which, you, the prospective book club member, can pour your book-related epiphanies in 140 characters.

Jeff Howe, the founder of the club, glorified this virtual creation of his in the NYTimes Book Review last Sunday:

[It’s] not much like a book club at all, unless a book club met in a sold-out Madison Square Garden. And nobody left the meeting for a solid month. And they all nattered on endlessly about a single book. If this sounds like a virtual Babel, that’s not far from the truth. This is literary exegesis in 140-character bursts. To wit, “Structure of Sandman ser like a Dickens novel, chars coming/going, sprawling plot, serial but a whole,” Kay Cunningham, a k a @lkayc from Tennessee, writes about Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel “The Sandman,” in the truncated argot of Twitter. (“Ser,” for instance, is short for “series.”) The staccato rhythm of the tweets can, at a glance, baffle and confound. Why would anyone choose to read a book — that last respite for the thoughtful, solitary soul — with thousands of clickety-clacking strangers?

A reader responds to Howe's rhetorical question (in the following paragraphs, Howe says "It's great fun") intelligently, and I quote the letter to the Editor (in the June 2 Book Review of The NYT in full:

I've always loved the novel for providing the reader the inestimable pleasure of entering a fictional world as an escape and deliverance from the problems of real life. Why would I want to open up this exquisite private experience to millions of unknown tweeters, thus diluting and distracting from the very thing reading a book most reliably delivers? The terrifying idea proposed [by Jeff Howe] takes the fad of "sharing" to the lowest level yet.

I agree!