The True Stories Book Club enters a new phase…
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Hello,
In the New Year, we’re making some changes to the Book Club which I think you’ll like.
From now on, we’ll be focusing on classic true stories rather than new releases. The reason for this is simple: we want to be a more book-clubby book club from now on. By that I mean: we want to make more room for discussion of the actual book with our wonderful subscribers, rather than talking to the author about their own work. I think this will let us all be more curious and honest in the future, discussing our responses as readers and enjoying being a community.
Running the Green Knowe readalong has been such a great experience, not least because it’s been life-giving to read all your responses in the posts each week. So I hope to bring a little of that spirit into the New Year. I’ll be recording an extra post with
halfway through each month to delve into the text as we all read together, and we’ll also be inviting a special guest for a final live recording in the last week of each month.I hope that will be a lot more fun, and give us all a chance to really think about true stories - books that guide us to the beating heart of life - as we continue to seek routes though this troubling era. Books that shift perspectives, invite us to experience the world more deeply, express feelings that we didn’t know how to voice. I’m thinking about essay collections such as Braiding Sweetgrass or All About Love, memoirs like The Year of Magical Thinking or Journal of a Solitude, hard-to-define books like The Spell of the Sensuous. Maybe you have some suggestions. I’d love to hear them in the comments.
We’ll be starting in January with an icy, ecstatic favourite of mine: A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter. There’s a live event in January - watch this space for more information in the New Year.
In the meantime, take care.
Katherine
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I am absolutely thrilled to reread Woman in the Polar Night. A friend lent it to me two years ago and it was absolutely fabulous. I read it in January or February, deep in the thick of a wild Wyoming winter when we got epic proportions of snow. I could feel the icy wind in each page, could smell the dry winter crust of the snow, and sense the immenseness of that polar landscape. At one point I swear I understood what it was like to become the aurora borealis. I cannot wait to read this with all of you! Thank you!
This is wonderful news to read!
I can’t help but nominate The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From The Sea, These Precious Days by Ann Patchett…
But I’m sure you’ll come up with something amazing 💫