Recent research indicates that in many college English classrooms, faculties continue to rely on New Critical approaches to teaching literature that focus analysis on the formal qualities of a text (Addington, 2001; Barrow, 2009; Bialostosky, 2006). Teachers using this method rarely invite students to bring their life experiences into their interactions with texts and each other. This leads us to wonder how much is lost when the cultural knowledge students bring into the classroom is rejected because of teaching approaches that do not recognize, as reading reception theorists such as Bleich (1975), Fish (1980), and Rosenblatt (1995) have, that reading is a profoundly social act. In contrast to formal institutions of learning, adult reading groups provide greater opportunities to explore how readers bring their cultural backgrounds to bear on their interaction with texts. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the members of a Black woman book club drew from shared cultural and linguistic resources to make intertextual connections between a mystery novel, "Buying Time" (Young, 2009), which details the travails of a disbarred lawyer, who is married to a materialistic "gold digging" woman, and iconic Rhythm and Blues (R&B) songs. The following research question guides this study: What cultural and linguistic resources did the participants draw upon during the book discussion and how did this enhance their understanding of the gender issues raised in the text?