What we’re about
This is a fun, unique, sometimes challenging but most fulfilling book club on classic literature. I'd like to believe that it's actually more than that, it's a bastion of preserving some old-fashioned human values in a wayward modern world. There are plenty of "dance the night away" and "beer lovers" meetups out there, with a myriad of attendees and full waiting lists. Nothing inherently wrong with that, although not my personal inclination for fun, but what about cultivating the mind and the soul ? What about cultivating deeper friendships and engaging in more profound conversations than "how was your weekend" ? This group will never have online events, lockdowns or not. I'm sure each one of you spends already far more time looking at a screen, than looking at and talking to a person.
We're going to read classical writers because their masterpieces have withstood the test of time and have risen to shine from the highest peaks of artistic achievement. Of course everything is relative in art, and we all have our preferences, some of the writers whom I have in mind are Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Ivan Turgenev, Somerset Maugham, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Thackeray, Proust, Dreiser, Galsworthy, Trollope, Flaubert...etc. Good literature doesn't have to be old, although it does look like the golden age was around the nineteenth century. Ultimately this book club is about socializing, conversing, laughing, talking about life and love and the moon and the stars and anything else that is of interest to you. Rules ? None. Rules are for computers and machines, people have a brain and a conscience and those constitute enough guidance.
