Diane Sawyer

‘Good Morning America’ features
NIU Masters Book Club

by Mark McGowan

Last November, six NIU College of Education graduate students began sending e-mails to “Good Morning America” in response to the show’s search for book clubs.

In January, the women of the NIU Masters Book Club got a response.

Soon after, though, their contact left the popular ABC news program. They figured their chances to share a book with the nation – and to receive a reading recommendation from another book club somewhere – were crushed.

Months passed without a word from the network. Club member Miriam Rodriguez, a fifth-grade teacher at Woodland Intermediate School in Gurnee, only could shake her head when her young pupils frequently raised their hands: “Have they called you back? Have they called you back?”

Suddenly, around the start of August, a call – the call – came in the form of an e-mail.

In the pre-dawn hours of Thursday, Aug. 7, four of the women and a friend welcomed a camera crew into club member Melissa Svoboda’s home for a live-via-satellite interview with Diane Sawyer.

“It was exciting and fun, knowing we were going to be able to share our club,” Rodriguez said. “It was definitely a good experience, and it was amazing to see all the work that got put into just doing a small segment of a TV program.”

They answered a couple questions about the club, which formed a year ago among the six suburban school teachers who met in a graduate studies cohort at the College of Lake County and continued onto NIU. They also got a tip for the next book they should read, Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi,” which they will start this week.

After their live segment, they taped a longer interview set to air Thursday, Sept. 18, when they will suggest a good book to the next club. Until then, they’re not allowed to reveal their choice.

But the thrill of national TV exposure has yet to dim, and the spotlight will shine again as a new school year begins in the coming days.

“We’re excited to go back to school and share it with our students and the teachers we work with,” Rodriguez said. “I kind of wish it was my old class, though. The students were really excited.”

“This is a really good way to promote reading to our students,” said Svoboda, a third-grade teacher at Ivy Hall Elementary School in Buffalo Grove, where an all-school assembly is planned to show a tape of the broadcast. “Reading is a No. 1 priority to me. Although I’m busy, and I’m with my students all day long, I still have time to read outside of school.”

Svoboda, Rodriguez and the others – Meg Hummel, Jennifer Langford, Lisa Profenna and Kelly Talaga – all graduated in May. They had known each other about a year, informally recommending books to one another, when the idea of a book club struck them last summer as a good way to stay in touch and have fun outside of class.

Monthly club meetings rotate through their six homes and involve food and discussion.

Book selections come simply from scanning newspaper book reviews, navigating through amazon.com or even during occasional club get-togethers at Border’s to wander the aisles just browsing. Rodriguez’s favorite title so far, Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” was one they heard of on “Good Morning America.”

“We try to find books that are unknown,” Svoboda said. “We have read books recommended by other clubs.”

“I enjoy reading because it puts you in somebody else’s shoes,” Rodriguez said. “Even though they’re not real, you’re reading about other scenarios and imagining what you would do in someone else’s situation and relating it to real-life experiences.”

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