Recently, I was invited to start a bookclub with some of my friends and tonight we had our first meeting to organize our year of reading. Two people came up with the idea. They invited three people to join them (this is where I came in) and each of the five of us invited an outside person that the others did not know well. Six of the ten people gathered to organize, going over dates, rules or “norms” as we called them, and, obviously, book choices.
I’m super jazzed about the list we came up with because it has a good balance of fiction and non-fiction with one classic and one play! We are starting with The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and will continue with the following list in an uncertain order:
Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire Bites: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disapeared by Jonas Jonasson
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman
The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard (this is the play!)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Moloka’i by Alan Brennert
I will post again with more about how meetings are structured and how it goes after the first book. It was so fun to plan and realize that if we want to pursue something academic or creative, sometimes we just have to ask people and get started. I’ll probably go download The Night Circus now and get started!
year of fun 