Criterion
Online Book Club
Criterion explores the works of contemporary and late-20th-century authors considered to be the modern classics or having that potential.
All our meetings take place on Discord.
The list of the books that we are interested in includes When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, Autumn by Ali Smith, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout, Island Of The Day Before by Umberto Eco, The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq, Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, and Antkind by Charlie Kaufman.
The list of the books discussed in 2022: The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet, The Magician by Colm Tóibín, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.
Contact: criterionbookclub@gmail.com
No prior knowledge is necessary to participate in these meetings. Only willingness to read a book (and watch a film if required). Don't be intimidated. There's no time like the present.
Queer Canon Book Club
Reading list includes: Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown, Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran, Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Genet: A Biography by Edmund White, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer, The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli, Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, Crystal Boys by Pai Hsien-yung, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, City of Night by John Rechy, The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman, and Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf.
Special: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
In addition to our meetings once a month, we are starting The Proust Challenge on August 21, 2022 with Volume 1 of the novel: “Swann's Way.” We'll have 7 meetings in total, every 3rd Sunday of the month.
Special: Ulysses by James Joyce
2022 marks centenary of the publication of James Joyce's masterpiece and we will celebrate the occasion by discussing one episode from Ulysses each week, starting on Sunday, February 20, 2022.
Ulysses is divided into three parts (marked I, II, and III) and 18 episodes. The episodes of the first edition did not have chapter headings or titles, these have been added “to avoid confusion and to aid the modern reader”.
Book Clubs Dissolved:
Adaptations was our monthly online gathering for discussion about books and their film adaptations.
Some of the titles from this list were Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando by Virginia Woolf, In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, Richard III by William Shakespeare, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, Maurice by E. M. Forster, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, Dracula by Bram Stoker, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Dune by Frank Herbert, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Ulysses by James Joyce, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, etc.
Non-Fiction Book Club
The list of books that we were interested in included Love in the Western World by Denis De Rougemont, This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, 30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays: Ebert's Essentials by Roger Eber, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia by Michael Booth, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land by David K. Shipler, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari, The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games by Tony Perrottet, Transgender Marxism by Jules J. Gleeson, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William B. Helmreich, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider by Peter Gay, Intellectual Impostures aka Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal, The House of Kennedy by Cynthia Fagen and James Patterson, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum, A Field Guide to the English Clergy by The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind by Judith Butler, When Brooklyn Was Queer: A History by Hugh Ryan, and many more.