About one year ago, a group of friends and I started up a book club. We would read a book and talk about it, simple as that. Our intentions were to stay away from general fantasy, sci-fi, and pop-fiction type books, and stick closer to ‘classic lit.’ One of the basic rules to keep this organized was ‘the author has to still be dead’ (which we eventually dropped when we read our collective least favorite book).

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We were a mix of backgrounds and knowledge levels. On the high end, we have members with full English degrees, who are very knowledgeable and able to give a lot of valuable context to what authors of an era or genre might have been trying to do or say, or to shine a light on the first piece of a puzzle and let those of us who don’t have that kind of background try and create our own interpretations on the text.

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Over the course of the year, we had 19 meetings. Two of those meetings were ‘show and tell’ rather than an agreed upon book, and we were able to sum up our thoughts and feelings with this handy chart: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/323269484918079488/1024097465936392204/delete_me.png

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If you hate pictures, which makes sense, then we also have this extremely helpful set of reviews:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-g2eNws6CTmb7qzpBL0AQ3j2XD-PNIOBUnL9sSNuOwo/edit?usp=sharing

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We started with No Longer Human because one of our members is a big fan of the japanese work ‘Bungo Stray Dogs’ and we thought it would be really funny to read something by one of the authors referenced in that work.

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We have most recently read Blood Meridian because going from the intensely emotional and self-deceptive nature of Wide Sargasso Sea to the extremely dry and desolate descriptions of atrocities made for an interesting contrast.

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Overall, this book club had some ups and some downs. On the one hand, it kept me reading. I had to keep up with the schedule, I wanted to engage in the discussion, and I don’t think there was a single meeting in which we had nothing to talk about.

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It was a lot of fun reading Nightwood (Djuna Barnes) for example, and feeling my mind actively expanding so I could hold more text at once and decipher what the fuck the Docter was saying (nothing important).

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On the other hand, it was kind of restrictive. This wasn’t the case for all of our members, but outside of reading the Bookers book of choice, I was pretty much unable to read anything else. I’ve got more than a few books on my shelf that I’d like to take a crack at, but I just don’t think I have the bandwidth to read them while also staying as an active Booker.

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The best book we read was probably Stoner, the most exciting book was Master and Margarita, and the best meeting we had was about Nightwood.

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Taipei sucks, don’t read it.