What we’re about
Welcome to reading aloud together and book discussions over zoom. Full length novels, short stories, essays, letters and diaries on Tuesday night. Non-fiction and modern to contemporary fiction, regular book club format. From time to time there are table reads of plays on Fridays. The remaining days of the week are open. Suggestions welcome.
We have a lot of fun. We read the entire book or the entire play together, from first page to last. Co-organizer Mark L. and I have found this to be a terrific way to get to know a writer, and to share with other readers. Currently we're reading Virginia Woolf, and writers connected to her.
Format for the read-alongs: At each session, a volunteer will recap the previous week's readings, and introduce the upcoming material. We will then take turns reading a few paragraphs at time, stopping for discussion as we go. Link to free copy of the text provided.
This is cool for books because: We gain a shared, thorough understanding of the book. We may take weeks and months to explore a novel (and the writer’s world). Also, you don’t “have to” prepare in advance. No anxiety-inducing deadline reading! Plus the obvious benefits of Zoom: not only can you attend in the comfort of your jammies, but you get to meet people from all over the world. By the way, vocal participation not required; some prefer to come and just listen.
Also, from time to time we read a variety of plays, from all eras, using scripts available on-line. Cold reads can be challenging, and few of us have done theater; but we learn a lot and have fun doing it. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/theater/plays-to-read-out-loud.html
Most of us will be non-professional speakers, learners and enthusiasts. Non-native speakers of English are especially welcome. People of all ages, gender orientations, ethnicities: please come. The only “rule”: be mindful of each others’ experience in the session.
Me: Literary fiction, history, biography, general non-fiction, natural history, poetry, and more. Louise Erdrich, Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Yann Martel, Toni Morrison, Lauren Groff, Madeline Miller, and many more. Most of these discovered via Meetup book clubs.
Cheers,
Sherry
***
By Hazel, our Founder, now retired:
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” ~Dr. Seuss
I've tried joining a few book clubs that were genre specific (chick lit), gender specific (chicks only), and author specific (Stephen King) but as none seemed to satisfy my palate, I thought I'd try to see if there were others like me, i.e. those who can equally enjoy the likes of Jane Austen, Stephen King, Shakespeare, Neil Gaiman, Dean Koontz as well as nonfiction books. Chosen as "One of the 5 Best Book Clubs to Join in New York" by CBS Local* ! (in 2012)
Story About The Name of this Book Club:
I am a huge Jane Austen fan and attended a Jane Austen Discussion at the Morgan Library featuring modern day authors whose works were a tribute to Jane Austen literature. One of the authors, Ben Winters, had written "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monster"' published by Quirk Classics. I admit that I had read "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by the same publisher and had no desire to read another work from their publishing house. During the Q&A session, Ben Winters confessed to an audience mostly comprised of the Jane Austen Society of North America that he had actually disliked Jane Austen in school and wrote his book to appeal to a larger audience. What caught my attention was an audience member who had read the book asked him to confirm the HP Lovecraft references in the book. (HP Lovecraft?!). He affirmed this, adding that other influences for the book included Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson. This intrigued me and yes I did go "Hmmmm..." buying the book that same day and devouring it over the weekend.That experience taught me to keep an open mind and inspired me to create this book club. As Ben wrote when he autographed my copy "Come on in, the water's fine.."
Upcoming events
18
•OnlineThe Waves by Virginia Woolf
OnlineLinks to FREE online copies of all texts will be provided in the comments section of this event page, shortly before our start time.
WELCOME: to our in-session reading and discussion of literature by and near Virginia Woolf, every Tuesday evening.
Tonight we continue our several-months-long journey through the most experimental, and most poetically beautiful, of Woolf's nine novels. This is a slow reading group, so please don't hesitate to jump in "midstream". You'll get the gist, and we focus on the current text.
In this book, six friends grow from childhood through late adulthood. "The power of communicating with profound insight and discriminating exactness experiences which are widespread and produce in the reader a sense of recognition is an essential part of Virginia Woolf’s creative gift, though it is not the whole. It is developed to its fullest extent in The Waves."
In addition to reading and discussing the text itself, we will deepen our understanding by reading excerpts from Woolf's relevant letters and diaries, and by tracing her friends' and family's lives which are woven through the characters, as well as other biographic information. For example, there is a quite a bit of Woolf's sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, in one of the current characters. Therefore, we will also be looking at Bell's life and paintings over the next few weeks, in conjunction with our reading of the novel.
Prior familiarity with the material is not necessary to enjoy these evenings. Taking turns, we read aloud during the session, discovering and discussing as we go. For those who do like to pre-read and even read ahead, here is a free copy of The Waves: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201091h.html
Aim: To have fun! A deep dive, to gain some degree of understanding and appreciation of the text.
Who: We are mostly non-professional readers, learners and enthusiasts. Non-native speakers of English especially welcome. All ages, gender orientations, ethnicities. Friendly people, mindful of each others’ experience in the session.
Where: Zoom. The link will be visible when you rsvp.
How to prepare: No prep necessary. We do our reading IN the sessions, out loud, taking turns.
What to bring: An open mind and a sense of humor. The text will be provided free of charge during the zoom via pdf or screen share.
Format: We take turns, with each person reading a few paragraphs at time out loud, pausing for discussion as we go. Reading aloud and discussing not required. It is fine to simply listen; most people do discover that they love reading aloud.
PLEASE NOTE:
- We begin on time. If you need to arrive later, log in to the zoom waiting room and you will be integrated into the group once we come to a natural stopping point. Special note to first timers: you are most welcome. However, due to the nature of the reading experience, and pesky zoom bombers, if a first timer needs to log in after our scheduled start time, please first direct message Sherry or Mark an hour or more ahead of the start time. Otherwise, if you come late, you will not be admitted .
- Links to free online copies of all texts will be provided in the comments on the event page. will be announced every Tuesday, in the comments section.
- Please open the material and find the starting point as you are logging in, so you will be ready to go.
5 attendees
•OnlineReadaloud: "Tamburlaine", by Christopher Marlowe
OnlineJoin us in reading plays out loud; no prior experience needed. We assign roles by scenes, and discuss the scenes after. For "Tamburlaine", we will be screen-sharing the text from the Penguin edition.
Trigger warning: this play contains very much that is evil.
Why we are reading Marlowe's Tamburlaine: because we just finished Shakespeare's Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3.
"In 1587, just at the time he was finding his feet in London, crowds were flocking to the Rose to see the Lord Admiral’s Men perform Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Shakespeare almost certainly saw the play (along with the sequel that shortly followed), and he probably went back again and again. It may indeed have been one of the first performances he ever saw in a playhouse—perhaps the first—and, from its effect upon his early work, it appears to have had upon him an intense, visceral, indeed life-transforming impact. The dream that Marlowe’s startlingly cruel play aroused and brilliantly gratified was the dream of domination…
The actor in Shakespeare would have perceived what was powerful in Alleyn’s interpretation of Tamburlaine, but the poet in him understood something else: … the hushed crowd was already tasting Tamburlaine’s power in the unprecedented energy and commanding eloquence of the play’s blank verse—the dynamic flow of unrhymed five-stress, ten-syllable lines—that the author, Christopher Marlowe, had mastered for the stage. This verse, like the dream of what ordinary speech would be like were human beings something greater than they are, was by no means only bombast and bragging… Shakespeare had never heard anything quite like this before—certainly not in the morality plays or mystery cycles he had watched back in Warwickshire. He must have said to himself something like, “You are not in Stratford anymore.” To someone raised on a diet of moralities and mysteries, it must have seemed as if the figure of Riot had somehow seized control of the stage, and with it an unparalleled power of language.
This was a crucial experience for Shakespeare, a challenge to all of his aesthetic and moral and professional assumptions. The challenge must have been intensified when he learned that Marlowe was in effect his double: born in the same year, 1564, in a provincial town; the son not of a wealthy gentleman but of a common artisan, a shoemaker. Had Marlowe not existed, Shakespeare would no doubt have written plays, but those plays would have been decisively different. As it is, he gives the impression that he made the key move in his career—the decision not to make his living as an actor alone but to try also to write for the stage on which he performed—under Marlowe’s influence. The fingerprints of Tamburlaine (both the initial play and the sequel that soon followed) are all over the plays that are among Shakespeare’s earliest known ventures as a playwright, the three parts of Henry VI—so much so that earlier textual scholars thought that the Henry VI plays must have been collaborative enterprises undertaken with Marlowe himself.
Shakespeare had determined to write a historical epic, like Marlowe’s, but to make it an English epic, an account of the bloody time of troubles that preceded the order brought by the Tudors. He wanted to resurrect a whole world, as Marlowe had done, bringing forth astonishing larger-than-life figures engaged in struggles to the death, but it was now not the exotic realms of the East that would be brought to the stage but England’s own past. The great idea of the history play—taking the audience back into a time that had dropped away from living memory but that was still eerily familiar and crucially important—was not absolutely new, but Shakespeare gave it an energy, power, and conviction that it had never before possessed. The Henry VI plays are still crude, especially in comparison with Shakespeare’s later triumphs in the same genre, but they convey a striking picture of the playwright poring over Holinshed’s Chronicles in search of materials that would enable him to imitate Tamburlaine.
The imitation, though real enough, is not exactly an expression of homage; it is a skeptical reply."
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition) (pp. 235-236). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
***
Late-comers, unless we know you, will generally not be admitted, as it disrupts the reading. However, it's fine for attendees to drop off at any time they want.
2 attendees
•OnlineThe Waves by Virginia Woolf
OnlineLinks to FREE online copies of all texts will be provided in the comments section of this event page, shortly before our start time.
WELCOME: to our in-session reading and discussion of literature by and near Virginia Woolf, every Tuesday evening.
Tonight we continue our several-months-long journey through the most experimental, and most poetically beautiful, of Woolf's nine novels. This is a slow reading group, so please don't hesitate to jump in "midstream". You'll get the gist, and we focus on the current text.
In this book, six friends grow from childhood through late adulthood. "The power of communicating with profound insight and discriminating exactness experiences which are widespread and produce in the reader a sense of recognition is an essential part of Virginia Woolf’s creative gift, though it is not the whole. It is developed to its fullest extent in The Waves."
In addition to reading and discussing the text itself, we will deepen our understanding by reading excerpts from Woolf's relevant letters and diaries, and by tracing her friends' and family's lives which are woven through the characters, as well as other biographic information. For example, there is a quite a bit of Woolf's sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, in one of the current characters. Therefore, we will also be looking at Bell's life and paintings over the next few weeks, in conjunction with our reading of the novel.
Prior familiarity with the material is not necessary to enjoy these evenings. Taking turns, we read aloud during the session, discovering and discussing as we go. For those who do like to pre-read and even read ahead, here is a free copy of The Waves: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201091h.html
Aim: To have fun! A deep dive, to gain some degree of understanding and appreciation of the text.
Who: We are mostly non-professional readers, learners and enthusiasts. Non-native speakers of English especially welcome. All ages, gender orientations, ethnicities. Friendly people, mindful of each others’ experience in the session.
Where: Zoom. The link will be visible when you rsvp.
How to prepare: No prep necessary. We do our reading IN the sessions, out loud, taking turns.
What to bring: An open mind and a sense of humor. The text will be provided free of charge during the zoom via pdf or screen share.
Format: We take turns, with each person reading a few paragraphs at time out loud, pausing for discussion as we go. Reading aloud and discussing not required. It is fine to simply listen; most people do discover that they love reading aloud.
PLEASE NOTE:
- We begin on time. If you need to arrive later, log in to the zoom waiting room and you will be integrated into the group once we come to a natural stopping point. Special note to first timers: you are most welcome. However, due to the nature of the reading experience, and pesky zoom bombers, if a first timer needs to log in after our scheduled start time, please first direct message Sherry or Mark an hour or more ahead of the start time. Otherwise, if you come late, you will not be admitted .
- Links to free online copies of all texts will be provided in the comments on the event page. will be announced every Tuesday, in the comments section.
- Please open the material and find the starting point as you are logging in, so you will be ready to go.
3 attendees
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