Next month we're reading When I Sing, Mountains Dance
Our November pick and December Secret Santa?
The summer break is FINALLY over and we’re back with monthly book clubs until the end of the year. Our next pick is the lyrical When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà, a short novel about a farmer who fancies himself a poet, about all the nature around us, about life and death and mushrooms. It will hopefully be wonderfully weird again!
Here are the important details:
We are meeting on the 1st of November at 20:00.
The book club is at Opzoomerstraat 12C, Studio Tideland
The book club is Bring Your Own Booze, so bring drinks (at least) for yourself.
Want to join? Email me at boredtodeathbookclub@gmail.com to reserve your seat. I will email you back with a confirmation. I only take email reservations because social media sign ups are a bit more uncertain.
The book club is free, but donations are welcome to help cover the location costs. You can buy me a coffee or use a tikkie.
Have ideas for the book club? I love to hear it!
What to read next if you enjoyed House of Leaves
I’ll have a post with more haunted house novels up on Instagram next week and during the book club many books were mentioned, so I’ll mostly focus on those!
But to start with Mark Z. Danielewski’s other work first: He has quite some books out, all playing with the form of the writing itself. If you don’t want to leave the House of Leaves world yet, I’d suggest The Whalestoe Letters for more Perafina writing, otherwise try Only Revolutions or get stuck in his (unfinished) series The Familiar. If anyone has started or read this, please tell me whether or not it’s worth it because I might just want to sign up for a new obsession.
Non-Danielewski recommendations from the book club were The Public by Federico Garcià Lorca which is a work of impossible theatre (sounds exciting doesn’t it), Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani, which is horror-theory fiction about the Middle East and Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. If you have any more recommendations, leave them for us in the comments!
House of Leaves Recap
It was definitely one of more chaotic book clubs, which was a lot of fun. There was plenty of ‘why was this?!’ and ‘but what does it mean??’ flying around, but also great ideas about the circularity of life and love, explanations of physics and discussions on why ergodic literature doesn’t seem to be that much of a thing anymore. Everyone enjoyed the book more or less, but we did agree that there was plenty of frustration while reading as well. Some liked Johnny Truant, some hated him, some were pretty spooked (me) and others weren’t, but all in all it was a great book to read together and to discuss. Reading it alone can be quite annoying and being able to talk about the mysteries is half the fun, so if you want to pick House of Leaves up, I highly recommend doing it with a friend!
We had some ideas for upcoming book clubs that I want to share! We thought it would both be fun to have book clubbers nominate books from their TBR so we can get through some books we keep putting off and I loved the idea of doing a secret santa for December (thanks Sam for that idea!). We would all bring a book, wrap it and write some buzzwords on the wrapping and swap books. Like the idea? Let me know and I’ll set it up!