With my newfound free time, I decided to start a book club at my church. I've wanted to get more involved and to give something to the church body for awhile, and I felt this was the answer. It also gives me a reason to keep reading good books and to continue to read scholarly articles about them. Over the past two years I found that I really love reading scholarship, but for some reason I often lack the impulse to read it. Hopefully being the "leader" of the book club will guilt, shame, or somehow force me to do the research. We'll see.
Since we are meeting at our house on
We just had our first meeting. We ended up at fifteen members, which is about maximum capacity. I only expected about half that many, so I was pleasantly surprised. At the meeting I handed out a questionaire to see which of the books I was interested in reading the members had already read. Here's the list:
The Catcher in the
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff
Not a bad list, if you ask me. The result of the questionaire is that we're reading Slaughterhouse Five first. It's one of my favorite books, so I'm pretty excited.
It begins like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.
It ends like this:
Poo-tee-weet?
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Church Street
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3 comments:
Good thing you all chose S5 - you're totally an expert on that book. I mean, remember that time in Germany when we totally tried to take a bus to somewhere where something from the book was allegedly supposed to have happened? And we just wandered around sweating for a few hours with no idea where we were. Quite an enlightening experience, really. People who haven't had it certainly have no chance of understanding the book. Do clue them in.
I'm sorry Mike, I don't really know what you're talking about. I do remember when we stopped off in Dresden, though, and how we visited the actual Slaughterhouse Five there, and how we even saw "'So it goes' -K.V." carved into the wall. Because surely we didn't waste three hours wandering aimlessly. Surely what I remember is correct.
Thanks for taking on this daunting task, by the way. I'm excited to be a part of the Church St. Book Club.
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