Book Club

I'm starting one. At the Bethesda library (knock on wood). The rub? It won't start until January 2007.

I know.

See, here's the thing. I had this idea that it would be cool to run a "classics" book group that would take four 19th century authors -- for instance, Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy -- and read their first (or, in the case of Collins, "firstish") book, a middle work, and then their last book (or, again, in the case of Collins, "lastish").

I picked those four authors partly because they're among my favorites, but also because they're a pretty good cross section of the literary influences on that century.

I've also created a blog to go with this new endeavor. You can find it here. There won't be a lot of posting or updating going on until the group starts meeting. Then, the site will carry synopses of the books we're reading as well as meeting reminders and recaps of the discussions themselves.

If it's a success, this idea, I'd like to try this same set-up with American authors -- some Edith Wharton, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and ... I don't know. I don't know my own country's lit as well as some others.

I also want to try a year of Tolstoy, where we'd take 6 months to read War & Peace, 3 months to read Anna Karenina, and then finish out with Resurrection, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Hadji Murad. And heck, a year of Dickens would be kinda cool, too. I mean, cool in a completely geeked out way.

But really: what did you expect from a guy who calls himself a British Adventuress?