A small but mighty group of tough-minded individuals finally worked our way through Thomas Pynchon’s new monster over the last few months. I think we’ve now settled on a pace that works for us, and even more importantly, we’ve selected our book for the next few meetings. I’d like to extend the reading group invitation to anybody out there interested in joining us.
Here’s how it works:
- The group meets every other Thursday at 7:30PM. Most of our meetings have been in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle at local pubs. If anyone wants to try reading remotely, let me know and we can try to make that work using the blog comments as a discussion forum.
- We spend at least half our time drinking, making small talk, and eating. If you’re a high-powered lit-nerd, you may want to find a more appropriate outlet for your snobby prowess.
- The idea of the group is to read challenging works which benefit from multiple points of view. We’ll vote on books as we approach the time for the next one to begin.
- We’ve found that 75-80 pages per week is our pace. Any more and people start to crumble under the obligation. The number of meetings we have will generally be based on page count.
The next book we’ve decided to read is “Poor People,” by William T. Vollmann (see the New York Times review here). We’ll be meeting March 29th to discuss the first 150-160 pages. You can purchase your copy (and support this blog) by clicking the image below:
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I wish I had time to read with you guys, but with school and all…
No problem, Greg. We’ll get you when you graduate and you miss the act of discussing books with other people. It’s weird but it happens.