Are you joining us to discuss I Who Have Never Known Men?
We're back after a short break and look forward to our 100th book club in March!
Next week we’ll meet up again to discuss I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. Thankfully it’s a short book so if you haven’t started yet, there is still time!
What you need to know if you are joining our upcoming book club
We are meeting on the 7th of January at 20:00.
Our location is Opzoomerstraat 12C, Studio Tideland
The book club is Bring Your Own Booze, so bring drinks (at least) for yourself.
The book club is pay what you can which will help me to cover the location and snack costs. You can buy me a coffee or use a tikkie.
If you have snack ideas or other suggestions, hit me up!
Most importantly:
If you can’t make it, please let me know! I have some more people on the waiting list and I would love to inform them as early as possible.
What are we reading for our 100th book club?
Yes you read that right. It will be our 100th book club! I’d love to celebrate it, but this starts by picking the book. Thanks to some great suggestions, I picked four books that have either the number 100 in them or the word century which was close enough for my purposes. I had to scramble a bit because many books I liked weren’t available. I have two fiction picks and two non-fiction picks so we can also have fun with that idea! Vote for your favorite and we’ll make a final decision at the book club.
The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg
In the Empire of Migdal Bavel, Cherry is married to Jerome, a wicked man who makes a diabolical wager with his friend Manfred: if Manfred can seduce Cherry in one hundred nights, he can have his castle—and Cherry.
But what Jerome doesn't know is that Cherry is in love with her maid Hero. The two women hatch a plan: Hero, a member of the League of Secret Story Tellers, will distract Manfred by regaling him with a mesmerizing tale each night for 100 nights, keeping him at bay. Those tales are beautifully depicted here, touching on themes of love and betrayal and loyalty and madness.
The Hundred Brothers - Donald Antrim
There's Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, and Noah; Nick, Dennis, Bertram, Russell, and Virgil. The doctor, the documentary filmmaker, and the sculptor in burning steal; the eldest, the youngest, and the celebrated "perfect" brother, Benedict. In Donald Antrim's mordantly funny novel The Hundred Brothers, our narrator and his colossal fraternity of ninety-eight brothers (one couldn't make it) have assembled in the crumbling library of their family's estate for a little sinister fun. Executed with the invention and intelligence of Barthelme and Pynchon, Antrim's taxonomy of male specimens is in equal proportions disturbing and absurdly hilarious.
Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World - Gaia Vince
Drought-hit regions bleeding those for whom a rural life has become untenable. Coastlines diminishing year on year. Wildfires and hurricanes leaving widening swaths of destruction. The culprit, most of us accept, is climate change, but not enough of us are confronting one of its biggest, and most present, consequences: a total reshaping of the earth’s human geography. As Gaia Vince points out early in Nomad Century, global migration has doubled in the past decade, on track to see literal billions displaced in the coming decades. What exactly is happening, Vince asks? And how will this new great migration reshape us all?
In this deeply-reported clarion call, Vince draws on a career of environmental reporting and over two years of travel to the front lines of climate migration across the globe, to tell us how the changes already in play will transform our food, our cities, our politics, and much more. Her findings are answers we all need, now more than ever.
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century - Kirk Wallace Johnson
On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins--some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them--and escaped into the darkness.
Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation.
If you have any ideas for celebrating our 100th book club, definitely let me know so we can turn it into a party!
January Book Recommendation
Sticking with non-fiction this time!
Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto - Kohei Saito
Why, in our affluent society, do so many people live in poverty, without access to health care, working multiple jobs and are nevertheless unable to make ends meet, with no future prospects, while the planet is burning?In his international bestseller, Kohei Saito argues that while unfettered capitalism is often blamed for inequality and climate change, subsequent calls for “sustainable growth” and a “Green New Deal” are a dangerous compromise. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity by pursuing profit based on the value of products rather than their usefulness and by putting perpetual growth above all else. It is therefore impossible to reverse climate change in a capitalist society— the system that caused the problem in the first place cannot be an integral part of the solution. Instead, Saito advocates for degrowth and deceleration, which he conceives as the slowing of economic activity through the democratic reform of labor and production. In practical terms, he argues end of mass production and mass consumptiondecarbonization through shorter working hours the prioritization of essential labor over corporate profits. By returning to a system of social ownership, he argues, we can restore abundance and focus on those activities that are essential for human life, effectively reversing climate change and saving the planet.
And a little bonus fiction recommendation for the ones who read to the end.
Gefeliciteerd met de 100e verjaardag! Indrukwekkend. Op naar de 1337!