Get more out of every book you read with professional facilitation.

Jennifer leads book lovers in stimulating, engaged, and elevated discussions of contemporary literary fiction and select nonfiction.

The in-person Pacific Grove book club starts in October 2024. The next round of the virtual Writers book club will begin in early 2025. We also recently finished a virtual New Climate Stories book club. To be sure you receive the announcements of upcoming book clubs and registrations, please sign up for the newsletter at the bottom of the page.

You can also bring in Jennifer to facilitate your existing fiction book club.

For a series that combines fiction and nonfiction, focused on topics that engage with the world, such as antiracism or climate change, check out the list of engaged reading topics we’ve facilitated below, and get in touch about designing a series for your group.

We hope to hear from you!

A literary fiction book club for Monterey Bay locals!

We will read a wide assortment of recent prize-winning and bestselling literary fiction, with stories covering multiple continents and a broad range of time periods and points of view. We meet in person at Pacific Grove’s independent bookstore, The BookWorks, for lively and elevated discussions of each book. The fee includes all books.

Third Wednesdays (except in May), October 2024 - June 2025, 5:30 - 7:00 PM, at The BookWorks, 667 Lighthouse Ave in Pacific Grove.

The selections are:

• October 16: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

• November 20: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

• December 18: James by Percival Everett

• January 15: The Tree Doctor by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

• February 19: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

• March 19: What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

• April 16: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

• May 14*: TBD

• June 18: The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Where: The BookWorks bookstore, 667 Lighthouse Ave in Pacific Grove. When: Third Wednesdays, 5:30 - 7:00pm, October 2024 - June 2024. *Note that we will meet on the second Wednesday in May. Cost: $300 for the nine sessions. $75 to register, $225 due by October 1. The fee includes all the books, a mix of paperback and hardcover editions. So sorry, but we cannot accommodate refunds.

Once you register, your copy of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow will be available for pickup at the bookstore. The other books will be handed out when we meet.

Wondering what to read this summer? Two of the book club selections are based on classics: James is a retelling of Huck Finn by Mark Twain, and Demon Copperhead is a retelling of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. This summer would be the perfect time to (re)read those classics!

Registration is full! To be notified of future openings, please subscribe to the newsletter below.

LOOKING FOR A BOOK CLUB FOR SERIOUS READERS?

We have a book club especially for writers and other close readers.

“Read like a writer,” goes the perennial instruction. That is, bring a writer’s eye to everything you read, noticing the many craft decisions the author has employed, and, in addition to marveling over great prose, asking: How did they do that? This group is designed especially for writers and analytical and deep readers. In addition to discussing each novel’s effect on us, we’ll explore what makes the work effective, in conversations that strike the balance between emotional response and analysis and in the fellowship of other close readers.

6-9 monthly meetings via Zoom. Capped at twelve participants.

We read a combination of classics and contemporary novels, selected by the group. Past choices include: The Magician by Colm Toibin, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, Trust by Hernan Diaz, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, There, There by Tommy Orange, The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, The Overstory by Richard Powers, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez, and The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li.

The next round starts in early 2025. Please sign up for the newsletter at the bottom of the page, to be sure you’re in the know!

A book group focused on climate change and related environmental issues.

The variety and sophistication of climate-related books has exploded in recent years, with more visionary work emerging alongside those groundbreaking books that first fearlessly explored the problems of a warming planet and human destruction. We’ll read both types of work but will focus on present-day and future solutions, reimagining the possibilities for living in harmony with the planet. As Rebecca Solnit pointed out in her recent article in The Guardian, “We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change…. What the climate crisis is, what we can do about it, and what kind of a world we can have is all about what stories we tell and whose stories are heard.”

Changing the future requires telling new stories. This group focuses on the new narratives that help us imagine a better future.

We’ll begin with Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua. After that, we’ll alternate between fiction and nonfiction. Reading both wide-lens nonfiction and the narrower but more personal stories in fiction allows us to consider climate issues from different angles.

We meet virtually, via Zoom.

Topics and book selections from the last round:

• The Future Is Here - Parts I and II of Not Too Late: “Join Us” and “We Have the Solutions”

• Transforming the World: Four Perspectives - A collection of excerpts from:

  • Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie

  • Climate Lyricism by Min Hyoung Song

  • Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation by Paul Hawken

  • The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate, edited by Amy Brady and Tajja Isen

• Disaster and Healing - first half of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

• The Best Case of the Worst Case - second half of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

• The Future We Want - Parts III and IV of Not Too Late: “Frameworks of Possibility” and “The Future We Want”

Potential titles for the future (with links to descriptions) include: 

Nonfiction:

• Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction by David Hinton 

• Pope Francis’s Encyclical

• Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening by Douglas Brinkley

• Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard

• The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

• A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars edited by Erin Sharkey

Fiction:

• The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

• Appleseed by Matt Bell

• Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde

• Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

• The Overstory by Richard Powers 

• A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet

• Fragment by Craig Russell

• Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

To receive a notice when the next round is scheduled, please sign up for our newsletter below.

  INTERESTED IN DEEPENING YOUR ENGAGEMENT WITH THE WORLD?

Engaged reading book groups dive deep into the chosen topic via alternating fiction and nonfiction book selections. Each group meets monthly for 6-8 sessions.

If you have a group or organization, you can bring Jennifer on to facilitate one of the topics listed below, or suggest a new one!