Google+ Book Club for October: Out Stealing Horses

Described by the New York Times as “short yet powerful”, a “gripping account of such originality to expand the reader’s own experience of life”, Per Petterson’s book Out Stealing Horses won the 2007 Dublin IMPAC Award, one of the richest literary prizes in the world. (You can read the first chapter here).

On October 8th at 10:00 AM (CST), we will discuss Out Stealing Horses via video chat (called a hangout - see video below) on the Google+ platform. (If you are not on Google+, email me and I’ll send you an invite).

Formats:

A serendipitous coincidence has surfaced in our Google+ book club: we are circumnavigating the globe, country-by-country, with some of the greatest writers as our guides. First, we strolled the streets of Paris with Hemingway, next we traversed the highland hills of Nairobi in Out of Africa, in Out Stealing Horses we are walking beside the great fjords of Norway.

Touring the world via books was a happy accident and one that we will continue to pursue. (I wonder what country we should visit next, ideas anyone?).

This is a rich, rewarding book, I hope you will join me. As always, if you plan to join us, be sure to let me know. Simply read the book and watch your Google+ feed on Oct 8th at 10:00 AM for the hangout link. (Here’s a handy world clock site for your reference).

The truth is that I have been looking for a definition of what art is all my life without fully understanding exactly what it encompasses, but, in the course of doing a speech, I looked up several references to what art was and I found one by Horace who was a critic and poet back in roman times 1st century or so and he had this great, great line he said “the purpose of art is to inform and delight” and I thought, wow, it can’t get much better than that.
Milton Glaser

Google+ Book Club - Out of Africa

The next book we’ll read and discuss on Google+ is Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. If you’ve never read Out of Africa, prepare to be amazed. Here’s what Hemingway had to say about it:

His first wife wrote very beautifully. She wrote perhaps the best book about Africa that I have ever read. - Hemingway on Baron von Blixen’s wife, Isak Dinesen

The Google+ Book Club is a monthly gathering of friends who love reading. In the comfort of our own home or in the midst of our favorite cafe, we can log in to Google+ and immediately share our thoughts on the book via video chat (called a hang out). The hang out commences at 10:00 AM (CST) on the second Saturday of each month. Next month’s hang out will be on September 10th. Join us!

What Keeps Me Running

It’s 108 degrees at 8:00 PM and I’m out running. Here’s why:

Podcasts.

Remember those? I’ve rediscovered them now that I’ve spun my favorite running songs incessantly. What I’m listening to lately:

Listening to ideas and others’ creativity motivates me. Oh, and this.

The entire point of a poetry circle is to read and talk about poetry, and to make you actually anticipate the time to do this oddball thing that is a supreme breathing exercise without a weight room, a word trove in the presence of things that leave you speechless … Poetry circles make you know you have a soul, and that other people do, too.
How to Read a Poem … and Start a Poetry Circle by Molly Peacock

Study Art

“The greatest thinkers and the greatest businesspeople have a passion for some kind of art.”

Google+ Book Club

Read a book. Hangout.

When I created my Reading the Greats site, I envisioned a day when a group of friends, scattered across the globe, could easily participate in a book club via a video conferencing platform.

Thanks to Google Plus, that day is today.

I’m starting the first (as far as I know) Google+ Book Club. It’s simple:

  1. each month, we’ll pick an author we’ve always wanted to read (or read more of)
  2. select a book from their canon of works
  3. on the second Saturday of each month at 10:00 AM CST, I’ll start a hangout on Google+ and we’ll discuss the book for about an hour (hour and a half, maybe)

August 13th, 10:00 AM (CST) will be the first hangout.

We’ll start with Hemingway. An expedition to new tech frontiers requires a bold explorer/author as our chaperone. A few suggested titles:

If you are not on Google+ yet, don’t fret. I’m certain invites will be pouring out over the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you plan on joining me, leave a comment on this post (or on Google+) and let me know which book you prefer to read. There might be three of us or ten of us … we’ll see what happens. Permanent beta!

Update (7/28): We’re reading, ‘A Movable Feast’, August 13th, 10:00 AM (CST)

The world is fundamentally hostile to literature, in great part because the world is gregarious, and literature is a solitary pursuit.
Andrew Lang, The Pleasures of Bookland from Speaking of Books

Arranging Ones Reading Shelves

Spent most of my staycation on a virtual road trip. In my library, I have a Morris chair, (one of my favorite places on earth). Reposed, I perambulate via my reading shelf: a physical “currently reading” collection of books much akin to the book bag one hauls to the beach while actually vacating on a vacation.

I’ve discovered that once you have a certain amount of books in your library you lose books you wanted to read. It’s a delightful surprise on one hand, to rediscover a book you purchased, but it grows irksome. Hovering above you is father time, his grim reaper and hourglass raised, taunting: you shall never read all the books you wish to read. (Joseph Epstein stated it best, “I myself would rather be well-read than dead, but I have a strong hunch about which will come first.”)

This makes ones reading selection a meticulous process.

I have more than one reading shelf. I have a physical reading shelf and a virtual reading shelf. My virtual reading shelves are digital shelves on my iPad (iBooks and Kindle apps, respectively). Arranging my reading shelves means I’ll spend less time over the next few months wondering what I should read next and more time at the serious business of reading. In the digital age, this is also a bulwark against the violent tide of social media, news articles and videos that threaten a hostile takeover of your reading intentions (a mind’s death by a thousand cuts).

A few examples of books from both shelves, first physical:

Virtual:

Arranging ones reading shelves is the ancient equivalent of digital ADD. Instead of being distracted by your digital milieu, you can be abstracted by your corporeality. I’m learning: a planned interruption is far more productive.

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” - Ray Bradbury

Heavy Sentences  |  The New Criterion  |  Jun. 15, 2011  |  13 Minutes (3,422 words)

Sunday Morning Drift

It started with a lazy drift through my RSS feeds. Bored by the litany of posts-for-posting-sake, (rescued from the shallow riptide), I glide towards deeper waters, namely, Longreads. I plunge into Gutted. Awakened, I steer toward  The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934. Carried by Means, I point purposefully towards Death Be Not Chic. Back-peddle. Straighten. Bend ahead. Slight turn. Heavy Sentences: Joseph Epstein writing about F. L. Lucas, a deep, cool current. Inspired, I leave my lumbering craft for terra firma. I search for Lucas in my library. The expedition for Lucas becomes a discovery of Isaac Singer. I read a chapter and return to Tumblr.

Where was I?

What Books Will Become

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest [Hemingway] walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.” - Adam Haslett
The Art of Good Writing

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