Read Like a Writer: A book group for writers and close readers

Dear friends and fellow readers,

Next Tuesday, we’ll wrap up To the Lighthouse’s first book club series for writers and close readers with a discussion of Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Our mix of books was wonderfully eclectic, but there were also some terrific resonances. We started with The Magician by Colm Toibin, the fictionalized account of Thomas Mann’s life, and then were inspired to read Mann’s masterpieceThe Magic Mountain. We read the Booker-prize-winner The Promise by Damon Galgut, with its roving close thirds, a stylistic descendent of another selection, Mrs. Dalloway, in which Virginia Woolf first helped establish “stream of consciousness” in fiction. Oddly, two of our six selections featured sanatoriums: The Magic Mountain and Trust by Hernan Diaz, one of my favorite books of recent years and a master class in perspective. And then there’s Parable, Butler’s brutal and visionary novel about a dystopic-future-cum-alternate-now and the community that regenerates care and hope in the darkest of times.

Our discussions have ranged widely over the terrains of craft, technique, and analysis, while also encouraging more personal responses. It’s such a smart group of readers, and I’m enormously grateful for their insights and participation. I think these selections challenged and encouraged all of us to be better readers and writers. I can’t wait to do it again.

The next round of the virtual Read Like a Writer Book Group starts April 11. I asked the early adopters to vote on the first selection, and they chose the Booker-winner The Remains of the Day by Nobel-prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro. So we’ll start there and meet on Zoom second Tuesdays at 5pm PT / 8pm ET, April - December. Potential contemporary selections include: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, The Overstory by Richard Powers, Women Talking by Miriam Toews, The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, Apeirogon by Colum McCann, and The Sellout by Paul Beatty. Potential classic selections include: July’s People by Nadine Gordimer, Beloved by Toni Morrison, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Ulysses by James Joyce, The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, and The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Register by March 15 to vote on subsequent selections and suggest your own. The price is $230, including a $50 registration fee.

You don’t have to identify as a writer to participate, and I promise, I’ll never ask for pages. If you love to read and think and read and discuss, if you want the challenge and reward of diving into a complex book and the support of a community of other reader-thinkers in analyzing it, this group is for you. As always, send me an email at jennifer@tothelighthouse.net with questions. I hope to see you there!

Yours in all things literary,

Jennifer