An Ideal of Human Company

Announcing the To a Green Thought Book Club

A Reading from Homer by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

• There’s a lot more info on this below, but in brief: I’m starting a To a Green Thought Book Club for readers of this newsletter who subscribe at the Founding Member level. We’ll meet on Zoom, on the third Sunday of every other month, at 3pm ET. Our first meeting will be February 16, and our first book will be Dinaw Mengestu’s Someone Like Us, one of my favorite books from last year. Our second read will be Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, on April 20. My hope is that this will be a fun, casual chance to explore books together—probably most of them recent novels, but we’ll see how things go—and also for me to get to know some of the readers of this newsletter. To join, all you need to do is subscribe (or update your subscription) at the Founding Member level—everyone who does so will get a Zoom link the Friday before our meetings. Just click on the Subscribe button below. Many more thoughts—about book clubs in general, and this one in particular—below. Drop any questions in the comments.

• Time is running out to sign up for the online seminar I’m offering this Saturday and next, January 18 and 25, on How to Write Sex (and Why). I’ve just finalized the packet for the first session, and am excited both to revisit some passages I’ve taught before and to explore the new ones I’ve added. The packet is going out (or has already gone out) this week, and you’ll get it as soon as you register, but you don’t need to do any reading before the class—we’ll read through everything together. I’d love for you to join us. More info and registration here.

*

I arrived in Iowa City in early August of 2013. I came straight from Bulgaria, pretty much—I spent a little window of time just outside Ann Arbor, shacked up in my brother’s basement while I waited for my Iowa lease to start. I didn’t know anybody in Iowa, and I was nervous about starting in the Workshop, becoming a graduate student again after seven years of high school teaching. I was also struggling—and it did feel like a struggle for a bit—with a kind of culture shock that felt much more severe than what I’d experienced when I moved to Bulgaria four years before. I was lonely, and the new app I had downloaded—Grindr hadn’t existed when I went abroad—showed a pretty depressing grid of torsos half my age. (Thank God I met Luis a few weeks later—trying to date as a mid-thirties gay in a college town is a particular flavor of bleak.) My living situation was a little depressing, too: a basement studio, the kind of student apartment I thought I’d graduated out of several years before.

Obviously the first place I went was the town’s bookstore, Prairie Lights—which is still, all these years later, my second, spiritual home; I stop by multiple days a week. These days, the owner, Jan Weissmiller, is a good friend, as is the fiction buyer and events coordinator, Kathleen Johnson, and I know all the longterm booksellers (most of whom have been there as long as I’ve been in town) by name. But those first days everybody was a stranger, and it has always been a maxim for me that stranger = danger. I remember worrying that the weeks before classes started would be difficult ones.

Then I noticed a flyer taped to a shelf in the middle of the store’s first floor, advertising “Paul’s Book Club,” a meeting of which was happening the next night, in the Public Library. Beside the flyer was a stack of copies of a novel I’d never read, by an author I’d barely heard of (and that only because a favorite writer, Peter Cameron, loves her): Rose Macaulay’s Towers of Trebizond. I bought a copy, feverishly read it, and showed up for the meeting. And for the next hour enjoyed, as I almost never do, a group activity.

Amazing how much that first meeting continues to flavor my experience of Iowa City: several people I met that night, seated around Paul’s circle, are still friends, or at least very friendly acquaintances, people I stop to chat with when we happen upon each other in the street. And then there was Paul himself: Paul Ingram, a legendary bookseller and Iowa City institution, who quickly became one of my favorite people to talk about books with. I’ve never met anyone like him: a dynamo of bookselling enthusiasm, always raving about something as he thrusts a copy of it in your hand.

When I think about what we would lose in a world of Amazon I think about Paul: no algorithm could approximate his wide-rangingly wacky taste, his ability to match each customer (he knew us all by name) with a book we had never heard of we would absolutely end up loving—or, on occasion, loving to hate. He loved tiny presses, he loved out-of-the-way sci fi, he loved the obscurest writer from the ruralest village in the country you had barely heard of who, a couple of decades down the road, was sure to win the Nobel. As often as he got me to buy a book he put an advanced reader’s copy in my hand—getting the right book to the right reader, ASAP, was more important than maximizing profits.

Paul Ingram, Little Village Magazine

He could be a lot—beloved as he was (as he is), there were a few people who would avoid the bookstore during his shifts. I never saw this myself, but apparently during a certain epoch there might have been a “Paul’s In” sign for the shop window to let both the wary and the eager know what to expect. I get the skeptics: All that intensity, all that book talk all the time; like all the best people, Paul was too much for some. But I loved it: someone I know, someone whose taste I respect, raving at me about a book I have to read? That’s my ideal of human interaction. Which is why, over the next several years, I went to the Prairie Lights Book Club every chance I could.

As I may have mentioned before in this newsletter, and as is true for a lot of writers I know, interpersonal interaction is not really my forte. I never lose sight of this fact, really—but I feel it especially intensely in the aftermath of a book tour. Apologies to those of you who experienced this over the past months—I promise I really did love meeting you, notwithstanding whatever signs of what might have seemed the contrary. I remember seeing a tweet, years ago, from somebody saying they had recognized me in a bookstore in upstate New York and said hello (they had never read my work, they were quick to clarify, but had seen me interview another writer at an event) and came away feeling that I was an asshole—I think they said something about how I obviously saw them as a “lowly fan.”

Friend, I promise that is not what I was feeling. I was feeling a flood of anxiety at the prospect of human interaction. I was doing my best.

I’ve discovered, over the years—thanks in large part to those monthly meetings at Prairie Lights—that my very favorite way to be “in community,” as they say, is to read and talk about books together. Book clubs and reading groups are crucial to my social and intellectual life; I’m happiest when I’m in several. I read Plato (and Martha Nussbaum) with one group of friends, and Heidegger with another. This week a friend and I are going to start working through three big books by Charles Taylor, a favorite thinker, who I sense is important for an essay project I want to tackle this year. I find that I read better when I know I’m going to be talking about a book with friends, and also that I’m less intimidated—Being and Time is easier to face when you have a friend or two to be baffled with.

Paul retired a few years back, though he’s still very present in Iowa City—I ran into him just last week. But nobody has taken up the mantle of the Prairie Lights Book Club, and I miss the chance to talk about a book of fiction each month, that uniquely pleasurable (for me!) way of being in community—not just with friends, but with strangers, too—that books make possible. I’ve sometimes fantasized about pitching Prairie Lights the idea of a new book club at the store, but I spend too much time away from Iowa City to make taking it on myself feasible—and really I’m too transient for any kind of in-person book club.

I’m not sure what gave me the idea, a few weeks ago, to start a virtual book club instead, one based around this newsletter; but the more I’ve thought about it the more excited I’ve gotten. I know—from your comments and messages, from meeting you on tour this fall, from reading your own newsletters—that a good number of really interesting people read these dispatches; I like the idea of having a chance to get to know some of you better. And a book club seems like a good way to address a concern I’ve had the past couple of years, especially as I’ve looked back over my reading for end-of-year favorites lists: I let myself get so consumed by projects that I don’t read enough for pleasure—and read fewer new books of fiction than I would like.

A To a Green Thought Book Club also solves another dilemma. When, a year and a half ago, I turned on the option of paid subscriptions to this newsletter, I just adopted the default Substack settings for tiers. That means there are three levels of paid membership: a monthly plan ($5), a yearly plan ($50), and then a plan for what Substack calls “Founding Members.” At $150, this tier represents a higher level of support of a writer’s work. I think the idea was to offer incentives for that higher support, which I’ve never done—and yet a handful of you have been generous enough to sign up for those memberships anyway.

Well. To repeat the info from up top: in addition to access to all new posts and the full archive of this newsletter, readers who sign up (or upgrade their subscriptions) at the Founding Members tier will get an invitation every other month to join me on Zoom for this book club. We’ll meet on the third Sunday of alternating months, at 3pm ET, for about an hour of casual conversation. We’ll start in February, and I’ve chosen the books for the first two meetings:

• Sunday, February 16: Dinaw Mengestu, Someone Like Us

• Sunday, April 20: Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost

As I say, these will be chances to chat casually—I’m interested in getting to know the readers of this newsletter, and I hope these meetings will be social as well as literary. They won’t at all be like my classes, which are pretty intensely structured and nerdy—focused on the kind of close analysis of texts that forms the serious business of a writerly education. I won’t be coming to the club to teach anybody anything, but just to share some impressions and enjoy your company. Sometimes I’ll have chosen a book I’ve read and admired, and want to read again; sometimes I’ll be reading something for the first time; in either case, I’m as interested in your responses as my own. My idea to start is that mostly we’ll be reading recent-ish fiction, but we’ll see how things go—we may want to branch out (to classics? to poetry?) as the group takes shape.

Anyway, an experiment. I love the idea of meeting with some of you each month to talk about books. I hope you’ll join me.

As always, thanks for reading—

G.