follow the reader is an ongoing online discussion group and once-a-month meetup every last thursday of the month (usually). friends near and far are welcome to join the literary adventure! each month we’ll have a book to read together, often accompanied by a optional supplemental text for the more ambitious readers. We look forward to some lively discussions and enlightening reads!

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February 2023: Birds of America

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

The celebrated collection of 12 stories from one of the finest authors at work today....

From the opening story, "Willing" - about a second-rate movie actress in her 30s who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being - Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America.

In what may be her most stunning book yet, Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.

PREVIOUS BOOK CLUB READS

April 2022: Agatha of Little Neon

Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette

Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don't), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self.

Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette's Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make. It is a novel about female friendship and devotion, the roles made available to us, and how we become ourselves.

March 2022: Ceremony

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

Thirty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power.

February 2022: A Match to the Heart

A Match to the Heart by Gretl Ehrlich

After nature writer Gretel Ehrlich was struck by lightning near her Wyoming ranch and almost died, she embarked on a painstaking and visionary journey back to the land of the living. With the help of an extraordinary cardiologist and the companionship of her beloved dog Sam, she avidly explores the natural and spiritual world to make sense of what happened to her. We follow as she combs every inch of her new home on the California coast, attends a convention of lightning-strike victims, and goes on a seal watch in Alaska. Ehrlich then turns her focus inward, exploring the tiny but equally fascinating ecosystem of the human heart, and culminated in a stunningly beautiful description of open-heart surgery.

January 2022: I Forced a Bot to Write This Book

I Forced a Bot to Write This Book by Keaton Patti

Ever wonder what an AI bot might come up with if tasked with creative writing? From Olive Garden commercials to White House press briefings to Game of Thrones scripts, writer and comedian Keaton Patti’s “bot” recognizes and heightens the tropes of whatever it’s reproducing to hilarious effect. Each “bot-generated” piece can be enjoyed as surrealist commentary on the media we consume every day or simply as silly robot jokes—either way, you’ll probably end up laughing.

November 2021: Poet Warrior

Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic, and wise follow-up to Crazy Brave, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice.

Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, and the messengers of a changing earth―owls heralding grief, resilient desert plants, and a smooth green snake curled up in surprise. She celebrates the influences that shaped her poetry, among them Audre Lorde, N. Scott Momaday, Walt Whitman, Muscogee stomp dance call-and-response, Navajo horse songs, rain, and sunrise. In absorbing, incantatory prose, Harjo grieves at the loss of her mother, reckons with the theft of her ancestral homeland, and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member.

October 2021: Noise

Noise by Darin Bradley

This haunting debut from a brilliant new voice is sure to be as captivating as it is controversial, a shocking look at the imminent collapse of American civilization—and what will succeed it.

In the aftermath of the switch from analog to digital TV, an anarchic movement known as Salvage hijacks the unused airwaves. Mixed in with the static’s random noise are dire warnings of the imminent economic, political, and social collapse of civilization—and cold-blooded lessons on how to survive the fall and prosper in the harsh new order that will inevitably arise from the ashes of the old.

September 2021: How to be Both

How to be Both by Ali Smith

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. It’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real—and all life’s givens get given a second chance.

August 2021: The Secret History

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

July 2021: Choose Your Own Adventure (Theme: Beach Reads!)

June 2021: Choose Your Own Adventure (Theme: Books About Books!)

WE LOVE BOOKS!! So pick up a book about books, and join us for an adventurous month of riveting bookish reads! We are planning an outdoor, socially distant film viewing of Can You Ever Forgive Me? and possibly even a field trip to Archer City, Texas on our annual Booked Up pilgrimage. (Sarah Ruth says if you aren’t sure what to read, she’d suggest one of Larry McMurtry’s nonfiction books, A Literary Life or, aptly named, Books.) We’ll share what we’re reading with one another in our Facebook Group and Discord throughout the month, and everyone will share what they learned in their reading during our monthly meetup on the last Thursday of the month.

May 2021: Braiding Sweetgrass

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass , Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Supplemental (i.e. optional!) read: Strangers: Essays on the Human & Nonhuman by Rebecca Tamas

In Strangers, Rebecca Tamás explores where the human and nonhuman meet, and why this delicate connection just might be the most important relationship of our times. From ‘On Watermelon’ to ‘On Grief’, Tamás’s essays are exhilarating to read in their radical and original exploration of the links between the environmental, the political, the folkloric and the historical. From thinking stones, to fairgrounds, from colliding planets to transformative cockroaches, Tamás’s lyrical perspective takes the reader on a journey between body, land and spirit—exploring a new ecological vision for our fractured, fragile world.

April 2021: Choose Your Own Adventure (Poetry Month!)

In honor of National Poetry Month, Follow the Reader is embarking on a choose-your-own-adventure reading month! Pick up your favorite poetry books, select some new ones, and/or even consider supporting your local poets by purchasing their books and reading their poetry online. We’ll share what we’re reading with one another in our Facebook Group and Discord throughout the month, and everyone will select their favorite poem(s) to bring to our monthly meetup (virtual!), where we’ll read them out loud and discuss.

MARCH 2021: Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close

Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

A close friendship is one of the most influential and important relationships a human life can contain. Anyone will tell you that! But for all the rosy sentiments surrounding friendship, most people don’t talk much about what it really takes to stay close for the long haul.

Now two friends, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, tell the story of their equally messy and life-affirming Big Friendship in this honest and hilarious book that chronicles their first decade in one another’s lives. As the hosts of the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, they’ve become known for frank and intimate conversations. In this book, they bring that energy to their own friendship—its joys and its pitfalls.

Aminatou and Ann define Big Friendship as a strong, significant bond that transcends life phases, geographical locations, and emotional shifts. And they should know: the two have had moments of charmed bliss and deep frustration, of profound connection and gut-wrenching alienation. They have weathered life-threatening health scares, getting fired from their dream jobs, and one unfortunate Thanksgiving dinner eaten in a car in a parking lot in Rancho Cucamonga. Through interviews with friends and experts, they have come to understand that their struggles are not unique. And that the most important part of a Big Friendship is making the decision to invest in one another again and again.

An inspiring and entertaining testament to the power of society’s most underappreciated relationship, Big Friendship will invite you to think about how your own bonds are formed, challenged, and preserved. It is a call to value your friendships in all of their complexity. Actively choose them. And, sometimes, fight for them.

FEBRUARY 2021: Borderlands Curanderos & So Far From God

Borderlands Curanderos: The World of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo by Jennifer Koshatka Seman

Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo were curanderos―faith healers―who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, worked outside the realm of "professional medicine," seemingly beyond the reach of the church, state, or certified health practitioners whose profession was still in its infancy. Urrea healed Mexicans, Indigenous people, and Anglos in northwestern Mexico and cities throughout the US Southwest, while Jaramillo conducted his healing practice in the South Texas Rio Grande Valley, healing Tejanos, Mexicans, and Indigenous people there. Jennifer Koshatka Seman takes us inside the intimate worlds of both "living saints," demonstrating how their effective healing―curanderismo―made them part of the larger turn-of-the century worlds they lived in as they attracted thousands of followers, validated folk practices, and contributed to a modernizing world along the US-Mexico border.

While she healed, Urrea spoke of a Mexico in which one did not have to obey unjust laws or confess one's sins to Catholic priests. Jaramillo restored and fed drought-stricken Tejanos when the state and modern medicine could not meet their needs. Then, in 1890, Urrea was expelled from Mexico. Within a decade, Jaramillo was investigated as a fraud by the American Medical Association and the US Post Office. Borderlands Curanderos argues that it is not only state and professional institutions that build and maintain communities, nations, and national identities but also those less obviously powerful.

So Far From God by Ana Castillo

Sofia and her fated daughters, Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and la Loca, endure hardship and enjoy love in the sleepy New Mexico hamlet of Tome, a town teeming with marvels where the comic and the horrific, the real and the supernatural, reside.

JANUARY 2021: It Chooses You

It Chooses You by Miranda July
In the summer of 2009 Miranda July was struggling to write her second screenplay, The Future, when she began to obsessively read the PennySaver classified ads. The iconic Los Angeles newsprint booklet served a computerless demographic—a quickly disappearing group, but one rife with stories. Who was the person selling the LARGE LEATHER JACKET, $10 OR BEST OFFER? It seemed important to find out, or, at least it was a great distraction from the screenplay.

Working with photographer Brigitte Sire, July interviewed thirteen PennySaver sellers to create portraits of their surprisingly moving, profoundly specific realities. Among these was Joe, an energetic 82-year-old with his own sweetly perverse body of artwork. By the end of the summer, July had written Joe into the movie as himself and the voice of the moon.

July reveals her hilariously random and blindly faithful creative process as we travel with her all over the city, and eventually to the set of The Future (in theaters in July). Combining narrative, interviews, and photographs, this book tells the story not only of the making of a movie in Los Angeles, but of the city itself.

DECEMBER 2020: Choose Your Own MEMOIR Adventure

We all have books we’ve been meaning to read (or re-read!), so allow our choose-your-own-adventure challenges to give your the motivation to pick up a book you’re interested in and share your newfound knowledge with our bookclub! For December, we going to celebrate surviving this hellish year to the tune of JUST READ A BOOK! Some FTR members recommend Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, if you can’t choose.

November 2020: Crazy Brave

Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo

A “raw and honest” (Los Angeles Review of Books) memoir from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States.

In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a haunting, visionary memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice.

Supplemental read: Your Art Will Save Your Life by Beth Pickens

A candid guidebook about art-making in the midst of oppression.

As a teenager visiting the Andy Warhol Museum, Beth Pickens realized the importance of making art. As an adult, she has dedicated her life to empowering working artists. Intimate yet practical, Your Art Will Save Your Life helps artists build a sustainable practice while navigating the world of MFAs, residencies, and institutional funding.

“I’ve already recommended Your Art Will Save Your Life to all my students and friends. I myself consult it regularly, for discipline, inspiration, and wisdom. This book is crucial, and Beth Pickens is exactly the person to write it—tough, friendly, experienced, politically incisive, spiritually wise. A slim, necessary revelation.” —Maggie Nelson

"An electrically inspiring, politically fresh, and class-conscious guide for artists who wish to engage more deeply with their process, their careers, and their lives." —Michelle Tea

"The self-help book every artist needs! Wish I’d had this book my entire life.” —Ali Liebegott

October 2020: Rebellious Mourning

We can bear almost anything when it is worked through collectively. Grief is generally thought of as something personal and insular, but when we publicly share loss and pain, we lessen the power of the forces that debilitate us, while at the same time building the humane social practices that alleviate suffering and improve quality of life for everyone. Addressing tragedies from Fukushima to Palestine, incarceration to eviction, AIDS crises to border crossings, and racism to rape, the intimate yet tenacious writing in this volume shows that mourning can pry open spaces of contestation and reconstruction, empathy and solidarity. With contributions from Claudia Rankine, Sarah Schulman, David Wojnarowicz, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, David Gilbert, and nineteen others.

"This intimate, moving, and timely collection of essays points the way to a world in which the burden of grief is shared, and pain is reconfigured into a powerful force for social change and collective healing." —Astra Taylor, author The People's Platform

"A primary message here is that from tears comes the resolve for the struggle ahead." —Ron Jacobs, author of Daydream Sunset

"Rebellious Mourning uncovers the destruction of life that capitalist development leaves in its trail. But it is also witness to the power of grief as a catalyst to collective resistance." —Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch

Cindy Milstein is the author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, co-author of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, and editor of the anthology Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism.

September 2020: Choose Your Own Anti-Racist Adventure!

If you’ve got some anti-racist, social justice literature or non-fiction you’ve been meaning to get around to THIS IS THE TIME TO BE READING IT! If you’re not sure where to start but want to get educating yourself, here’s a great list of books on racial justice to get your started: https://mashable.com/article/new-books-black-authors-you-should-read/

Everyone is encouraged to take notes on what they are reading and learning so we can discuss everyone’s thoughts during our monthly meetup (still on ZOOM) the last Thursday of the month. We look forward to learning and growing together!

August 2020: A Grave is Given Supper

A Grave is Given Supper by Mike Soto

A Narco-Acid Western in profound poetic form, using themes from the ongoing drug war taking place in a fictional U.S./Mexico border town.

"The landscape in A Grave is Given a Supper recalls the tones of Frank Stanford, steeped with our phantasmagoric Texan borderlands. Soto offers up each poem like a votive candle, wreath of roses, or weapon, to lay on the altar of the outlaw Jesus Malverde, announcing the arrival of a new literary voice." —Fernando A. Flores, author of Pig Latin and Stuck on a Razor

"Los Tigres del Norte warn, in a classic narcocorrido that I can imagine sputtering over the static of a sun-bleached radio in the border town where this collection is set, Sin talento no busques grandeza. In A Grave Is Given Supper, a debut as hauntingly moving as a dog's three-legged waltz, Soto displays a talent that achieves that greatness, lyrically guiding us through the desperation, dehumanization, and senseless tragedies born of our war on drugs." —David Shook

Order from Deep Vellum Books: http://deepvellum.org/product/a-grave-is-given-supper/

Supplemental Read: The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo

His spiritual quest began with the Japanese master Ejo Takata, the man who introduced him to the practice of meditation, Zen Buddhism, and the wisdom of the koans. Yet in this autobiographical account of his spiritual journey, Jodorowsky reveals that it was a small group of wisewomen, far removed from the world of Buddhism, who initiated him and taught him how to put the wisdom he had learned from his master into practice.

At the direction of Takata, Jodorowsky became a student of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, thus beginning a journey in which vital spiritual lessons were transmitted to him by various women who were masters of their particular crafts. These women included Doña Magdalena, who taught him “initiatic” or spiritual massage; the powerful Mexican actress known as La Tigresa (the “tigress”); and Reyna D’Assia, daughter of the famed spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff. Other important wisewomen on Jodorowsky’s spiritual path include María Sabina, the priestess of the sacred mushrooms; the healer Pachita; and the Chilean singer Violeta Parra. The teachings of these women enabled him to discard the emotional armor that was hindering his advancement on the path of spiritual awareness and enlightenment.

July 2020: Choose Your Own MEMOIR Adventure

We all have books we’ve been meaning to read (or re-read!), so allow our choose-your-own-adventure challenges to give your the motivation to pick up a book you’re interested in and share your newfound knowledge with our bookclub! For July, we’re choosing the theme of MEMOIR!

At our monthly meetup (still the last Thursday of every month, now via ZOOM because pandemic), we’ll each share (an) excerpt(s) from the book we chose and discuss our thoughts. At the end we can swap books for further reading adventures! Let us know what you’re reading, join the conversation, and access our live streams via our Facebook group. We can’t wait to see what everyone dives into!

Supplemental Read: The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.

For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse.  (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.

June 2020: Wow No Thank You

Wow No Thank You by Samantha Irby

Irby is forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her. She has left her job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, has published successful books and has been friendzoned by Hollywood, left Chicago, and moved into a house with a garden that requires repairs and know-how with her wife in a Blue town in the middle of a Red state where she now hosts book clubs and makes mason jar salads. This is the bourgeois life of a Hallmark Channel dream. She goes on bad dates with new friends, spends weeks in Los Angeles taking meetings with "tv executives slash amateur astrologers" while being a "cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person," "with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees," who still hides past due bills under her pillow.
     The essays in this collection draw on the raw, hilarious particulars of Irby's new life. Wow, No Thank You. is Irby at her most unflinching, riotous, and relatable.

May 2020: A Paradise Built in Hell

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster, whether manmade or natural, people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities?

In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.

Supplemental Read: Create Dangerously by Albert Camus

In 1957, Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Albert Camus gave a speech entitled "Create Dangerously," effectively a call to arms for artists, in particular those who came from an immigrant background, like he did. Camus understood the necessity of those making art as a part of civil society. A bold cry for artistic freedom and responsibility, his words today remain as timely as ever. In this new translation, Camus's message, available as a stand-alone little book for the first time, will resonate with a new generation of writers and artists.

April 2020: Choose Your Own Adventure (Poetry Month!)

In honor of National Poetry Month, Follow the Reader is embarking on a choose-your-own-adventure reading month! Pick up your favorite poetry books, select some new ones, and/or even consider supporting your local poets by purchasing their books and reading their poetry online. We’ll share what we’re reading with one another in our Facebook Group throughout the month, and everyone will select their favorite poem(s) to bring to our monthly meetup (now happening on Zoom, hit us up for the link!), where we’ll read them out loud and discuss!

March 2020: Persepolis

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, "Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran's last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.

"Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane's child's-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, "Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.

Supplemental Read: Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas

In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father's glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since.

Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas's wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.
In a series of deftly drawn scenes, we watch the family grapple with American English (hot dogs and hush puppies?--a complete mystery), American traditions (Thanksgiving turkey?--an even greater mystery, since it tastes like nothing), and American culture (Firoozeh's parents laugh uproariously at Bob Hope on television, although they don't get the jokes even when she translates them into Farsi).
Above all, this is an unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love. It is a book that will leave us all laughing--without an accent.

January 2020: The Power

The Power by Naomi Alderman

In THE POWER, the world is a recognizable place: there's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power--they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.

From award-winning author Naomi Alderman, THE POWER is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways.

Supplemental Read: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

"A Room of One's Own" is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published in 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled "Women and Fiction", and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

February 2020: If Beale Street Could Talk

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin’s story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions–affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

Supplemental Read: Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time, from his home in “The Harlem Ghetto” to a sobering “Journey to Atlanta.”

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic. His criticism on topics such as the paternalism of white progressives or on his own friend Richard Wright’s work is pointed and unabashed. He was also one of the few writing on race at the time who addressed the issue with a powerful mixture of outrage at the gross physical and political violence against black citizens and measured understanding of their oppressors, which helped awaken a white audience to the injustices under their noses. Naturally, this combination of brazen criticism and unconventional empathy for white readers won Baldwin as much condemnation as praise.

December 2019: Choose Your Own Adventure, Biography Edition!

We all have books we’ve been meaning to read (or re-read!), so allow our choose-your-own-adventure challenges to give your the motivation to pick up a book you’re interested in and share your newfound knowledge with our bookclub! For December, we’re choosing the theme of BIOGRAPHIES! If you’re not sure what to read, the NYT put together a pretty cool list of literary biographies that is worth a browse!

On our monthly meetup (last Thursday of every month, IRL & online!), we’ll each share (an) excerpt(s) from the book we chose and discuss our thoughts. At the end we can swap books for further reading adventures! Let us know what you’re reading, join the conversation, and access our live streams via our Facebook group. We can’t wait to see what everyone dives into!

November 2019: How We Became Human

How We Became Human by Joy Harjo

This collection gathers poems from throughout Joy Harjo's twenty-eight-year career, beginning in 1973 in the age marked by the takeover at Wounded Knee and the rejuvenation of indigenous cultures in the world through poetry and music. How We Became Human explores its title question in poems of sustaining grace.

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and was named the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019.

The author of nine books of poetry, several plays and children's books, and a memoir, Crazy Brave, her many honors include the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, a PEN USA Literary Award, Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Writers’ Award, a Rasmuson US Artist Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Harjo is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Supplemental Read:Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopeless of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the sixties and seventies. Mary eventually married Leonard Crow Dog, the American Indian Movement's chief medicine man, who revived the sacred but outlawed Ghost Dance.

Originally published in 1990, Lakota Woman was a national best seller and winner of the American Book Award. It is a unique document, unparalleled in American Indian literature, a story of death, of determination against all odds, of the cruelties perpetuated against American Indians, and of the Native American struggle for rights. Working with Richard Erdoes, one of the twentieth century's leading writers on Native American affairs, Brave Bird recounts her difficult upbringing and the path of her fascinating life.

October 2019: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty

SEPTEMBER 2019: The Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Supplemental Reading:
The Chandelier by Clarice Lispector

The Chandelier, written when Lispector was only twenty-three, reveals a very different author from the college student whose debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, announced the landfall of “Hurricane Clarice.” Virgínia and her cruel, beautiful brother, Daniel, grow up in a decaying country mansion. They leave for the city, but the change of locale leaves Virgínia’s internal life unperturbed. In intensely poetic language, Lispector conducts a stratigraphic excavation of Virgínia’s thoughts, revealing the drama of Clarice’s lifelong quest to discover “the nucleus made of a single instant”—and displaying a new face of this great writer, blazing with the vitality of youth.

August 2019: The Last Picture Show

The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

This is one of McMurtry's most memorable novels - the basis for the film of the same name. Set in a small, dusty Texas town, it introduces Jacy, Duane and Sonny, teenagers stumbling towards adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love.

Larry McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas on June 3, 1936. He is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove, three memoirs, two essay collections, and more than thirty screenplays. His first published book, Horseman, Pass By, was adapted into the film "Hud." A number of his other novels also were adapted into movies as well as a television mini-series. Among many other accolades, in 2006 he was the co-winner of both the Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain."

Supplemental Reading + Follow the Reader Field Trip!
Walter Benjamin and the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry
Field trip to Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, date TBA

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become. 

Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier. 

McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

Have a book you think is awesome? Tell us about it here, and it could be our next read!

July 2019: Being Dead

Being Dead by Jim Crace

Selected by Spiderweb Reader Shadan Kishi Price!

Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. Instead, they are battered to death by a thief with a chunk of granite. Their corpses lie undiscovered and rotting for a week, prey to sand crabs, flies, and gulls. Yet there remains something touching about the scene, with Joseph's hand curving lightly around his wife's leg, "quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."

From that moment forward, Being Dead becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward, we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus, it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs, birds, and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death.

Published by MacMillan Publishing

Supplemental Reading:
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Published by Random House

From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Joan Didion is an American journalist and writer of novels, screenplays, and autobiographical works. Didion is best known for her literary journalism and memoirs.

June 2019: Choose Your Own Adventure, Summer Edition!

We all have a book we’ve been meaning to read (or re-read!), so allow our summer choose-your-own-adventure challenge give your the motivation to pick up a book and share what you’re reading with our bookclub! On our monhtly meetup (last Thursday of every month, IRL & online!), we’ll each share an excerpt from the book we chose and discuss our thoughts. At the end we can swap books for further summer reading adventures! Let us know what you’re reading, join the conversation, and access our live streams via our Facebook group. We can’t wait to see what everyone dives into!

May 2019: The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

Published by Dorothy, A Publishing Project

Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life.

Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), this book captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist’s life.

Supplemental Reading:
Farewell to the Muse: Love, War, and the Women of Surrealism by Whitney Chadwick

Published by Thames & Hudson Books

Farewell to the Muse documents what it meant to be young, ambitious, and female in the context of an avant-garde movement defined by celebrated men whose backgrounds were often quite different from those of their younger lovers and companions. Focusing on the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Whitney Chadwick charts five female friendships among the Surrealists to show how Surrealism, female friendship, and the experiences of war, loss, and trauma shaped individual women’s transitions from someone else’s muse to mature artists in their own right. Her vivid account includes the fascinating story of Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe in occupied Jersey, as well as the experiences of Lee Miller and Valentine Penrose at the front line.

April 2019: Choose Your Own Adventure (Poetry Month!)

In honor of National Poetry month this year, Follow the Reader is embarking on a choose-your-own-adventure reading month! Pick up your favorite poetry books, select some new ones, and/or even consider supporting your local poets by purchasing their books and reading their poetry online (a complete list of Spiderweb-affiliated poetry materials and recommendations will be released early April!). We’ll share what we’re reading with one another in our Facebook Group throughout the month, and everyone will select their favorite poem(s) to bring to our monthly meetup, where we’ll read them out loud and discuss!

Supplemental Reading:

For the super-committed poets among us, we’ve selected an excellent supplemental read to go with all this poetry: Marty McConnell’s Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop.

Available from Yes Yes Books here.

“Would you like a blueprint for running successful workshops?
Are you looking for innovative and interactive writing prompts? 
How about exercises specifically designed for poems by some of our most exciting contemporary voices?
Marty McConnell offers start-to-finish instructions along with a grounding in the Gathering Voices approach for both aspiring and seasoned facilitators who want to establish or invigorate a poetry learning community or for poets who want to deepen and expand their own poetic voice.” 

March 2019: The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse

The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich

Published by Harper Collins Publishers

This is the story of Father Damien Modeste, priest to his beloved people, the Ojibwe. Modeste, nearing the end of his life, dreads the discovery of his physical identity -- for he is a woman who has lived as a man.

In a masterwork that both deepens and enlarges the world of her previous novels set on the same reservation, Louise Erdrich captures the essence of a time and the spirit of a woman who felt compelled by her beliefs to serve her people as a priest. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is a work of an avid heart, a writer's writer, and a storytelling genius.

Supplemental reading:
Women Who Run with Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Published by Ballantine Books

Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society’s attempt to “civilize” us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls.

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.

Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.

February 2019: Kindred

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Published by Beacon Press

The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

”Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.”

Supplemental reading:
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Published by Penguin Random House

“Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.”

January 2019: Sphinx

Sphinx by Anne Garréta
Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan; published by Deep Vellum Books

A landmark literary event: the first novel by a female member of Oulipo in English: a sexy, genderless love story.

“Anne F. Garréta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. A normalien (graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Anne F. Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), hailed by critics, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator’s love interest, A***.”

Supplemental Reading:
Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature by Daniel Levin Becker

Published by Harvard University Press

“Daniel Levin Becker's brilliant and entertaining book about the Oulipo combines meticulously researched history, a complete panoply of thumbnail portraits (he uses both thumbs), shrewd critical appraisal, and - bless him! - autobiography. If Oulipians are 'rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape,' he has explored the subtle channels of the labyrinth and caught all the rats; and he movingly describes why he is happy to have become a rat himself.”