even*cleveland: 2013 e*c book club reading list

2013 e*c book club reading list

January 14: Jane Austen: Mansfield Park
February 11: Susan Howe: My Emily Dickinson
March 11: Francis Hodgson Burnett: A Little Princess
April 8: Henry James: What Maisie Knew
May 13: Jean Strouse: Alice James
June 10: George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss
July 8: Barbara Comyns: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
August 12: Virginia Woolf: The Years
September 9: Laura Riding: Progress of Stories
October 14: Edward de Waal: The Hare With Amber Eyes
November 11: Isak Dinesen: Seven Gothic Tales
December 9: James Joyce: Dubliners

Year one of the book club was more fun than I expected, and I can't wait to see what this year brings.

If you'd like to come, please do. We are a pretty friendly, eclectic bunch, and each meeting is open to anyone who has read the book. There's no expectation that you'll stick around from month to month (although you are welcome to). We meet at Community Bookstore in Park Slope at 7:00 p.m. on the second Monday of the month.

I do a fair amount of research for each book before our meetings, which you can follow here: http://evencleveland.tumblr.com/

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

2013 e*c book club reading list

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