Our book club meets monthly and is open to anyone who'd like to join. There is no need to reserve a spot or even buy the book from us, simply show up prepared to discuss the book on the night of the meeting.
JANUARY
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28TH
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: GRAND RAPIDS, by Nathasha Stagg
[buy it here]
A new novel from the celebrated author of Surveys, set in the Michigan suburbs of the early 2000s.
Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder's public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001--the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: DEAD WEIGHT; ESSAYS ON HUNGER AND HARM, by Emmeline Clein
[buy it here]
A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they’ve wrought
“An authoritative, generous, and persuasive debut that I wish I could go back in time and gift to my teenage self.”—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood
In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein recounts her struggle with disordered eating alongside the stories of other women: historical figures, pop culture celebrities, and the girls she’s known and loved. Through the story of her own sickness, the raw recollections of interview subjects, and dispatches from social media rabbit holes, Clein challenges stereotypes and renders statistics and science deeply personal and urgent. From her first encounters with icons of the thin ideal to her years ricocheting between hunger and bingeing, from the pro-anorexia blog that unexpectedly saved someone’s life to the residential treatment centers that make so many people sicker, from a wrenching elegy for those who didn’t survive to a manifesto for sisterhood, solidarity, and recovery, Clein uncovers girlhood’s appetites and injuries to reveal the economic, cultural, and political history of an epidemic.
Dead Weight makes the case that we are faced with a culture of suppression, self-denial, and self-harm, an insidious, pervasive, and dangerous American cult of femininity rooted in racism and misogyny. Tracing the medical and cultural histories of anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder and investigating the recent rise of orthorexia, Clein reveals the economic conditions underpinning diet culture, and grapples with the ways today’s feminism can be complicit in propping up the fetish of self-shrinking.
Drawing on a kaleidoscopic array of sources—from cult classic films like Jennifer’s Body to the aughts-era Tumblrverse, the writing of Simone Weil, Chris Kraus, and Anne Boyer to the medieval canon of anorexic saints—Clein calls for a feminism that doesn’t compel women to shrink their bodies to increase their value, urging radical acceptance of all our appetites instead: for food, connection, and love. A sharp, perceptive, and revelatory polemic about the external forces that shape our lives, Dead Weight is electrifying, unapologetically bold, and fiercely compassionate.