Next week is our 100th book club! What a milestone, one that I’m excited to celebrate with all of you, whether you can be there or not.
We’ll discuss The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson, which is our first foray into non-fiction. I’m halfway and have many thoughts and can’t wait to hear what all of you have to say about it!
What you need to know if you are joining our upcoming book club
We are meeting on the 6th of March 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! We already have a cake situation arranged and I’ll bring something bubbly for all of us to toast with. Anything else is always welcome!
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 next month?
There are two books that came our last year that just screamed Bored to Death book club to me and it felt like time to get weird again. And somehow both titles start with the main characters first name, so there’s the theme for ya.
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee
Jonathan Abernathy is drowning in debt. If he can appear to be competent at his new job, he might have a chance at a new life. But at what cost?
Jonathan Abernathy is fucked. Jobless, behind on student loan payments, and a self-declared failure, the only thing Abernathy has in abundance is debt.
When a government loan forgiveness program offers him a job he can do literally in his sleep, he thinks he’s found his big break. That is, until he finds himself auditing the dreams of white-collar workers, flagging their anxieties and preoccupations for removal. As Abernathy finds his footing in this new role, reality and morality begin to warp around him. Soon, the lines between life and work, love and hate, right and wrong, even sleep and consciousness, begin to blur.
At once tender, startling, and deeply funny, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is a piercing critique of late-stage capitalism and a reckoning with its true cost.
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner
This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer on the cusp of a windfall, courtesy of the Social Evils prize committee, for whom the actual gong - and with it the prize money - remains tantalizingly out of reach.
Neon beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with partner Drew and surprise eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular detour through their childhood in the Forest - via an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, through wormholes and time loops, Corey learns - the hard way - the difference between a prize and a gift.
Both radiant and revolutionary, Isabel Waidner's fiction gleefully takes a hammer to false binaries, boundaries and borders, turning walls into bridges and words into wings. Fierce, fluid and funny, they free us to imagine another way of being.
This is a novel about coming into one's own, the labour of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself and the pitfalls of social mobility. It's about watching TV with your lover.
February Book Recommendation
I also really want to read Kirsten Bakis’ other novel which is about monster dogs who can talk and pretend to live in 1900’s Germany.
King Nyx by Kirsten Bakis
Set in November 1918 on the opulent, castle-like island estate of an eccentric millionaire, Claude Arkel, this atmospheric, compellingly readable novel reimagines the life of Anna Filing Fort--whose husband, Charles Hoy Fort, was the most famous "anomalist" of the early twentieth century. Settling in as guests on Prosper Island, the young couple find themselves quarantined in a shabby outpost far from Mr. Arkel's mansion--from which, they learn, three girls have gone missing. After she encounters a figure in the woods that may be the ghost of her long-lost friend Mary, Anna resolves to find out who Mr. Arkel really is, and what has become of the missing girls.
A contemporary feminist tale with the mood and mystery of a classic gothic novel, King Nyx reintroduces readers, twenty-five years after her acclaimed debut, to one of our most astonishingly imaginative storytellers.
And as always a little bonus recommendation for those who read to the end.