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.
Current meeting schedule:
NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB
Wednesday, March 27th, 7pm: SILENT WHALE LETTERS by Ella Finer & Vibeke Mascini
A long-distance correspondence reflecting on the infravoice of a blue whale and other so-called "silent" subjects.
An experiment in listening to frequencies beyond human sensorial range, Silent Whale Letters is a long-distance correspondence intimately attuned to the infravoice of a blue whale, a document held silent in the sound archive, and other so-called "silent" subjects.
As part of an ongoing collaboration between Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini the letters consider how the silent document shifts the logic of the archive, figuring listening as a practice of preservation.
As the letters attune to the ocean loud with communications across time and space, the authors write about the movement of matter, of energies, wavelengths, currents and how the ocean preserves as it disperses what it carries. How does working with what we cannot see, or even hear within range, shift the parameters of attention? How does the energetic archival space of the ocean agitate and disrupt claims to knowledge, history, and power?
Moving through three years of call and response the book unfolds through "a joint meditation on the transformative potential of a note, a voice, carried from saltwater into the archive" (Rebecca Giggs).
They chart a process that is equally conceptual and intimate, theoretical and deeply personal, moving through discussions of (amniotic) undercurrents, call-and-response mechanisms, energetic wavelengths, oceanic and archival memory, mysterious scales, and the watery acoustic commons.
FICTION BOOK CLUB
Thursday, March 28th, 7pm: BERG by Ann Quin
"A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . ."
So begins Ann Quin's madcap frolic with sinister undertones, a debut "so staggeringly superior to most you'll never forget it" (The Guardian). Alistair Berg hears where his father, who has been absent from his life since his infancy, is living. Without revealing his identity, Berg takes a room next to the one where his father and father's mistress are lodging and he starts to plot his father's elimination. Seduction and violence follow, though not quite as Berg intends, with Quin lending the proceedings a delightful absurdist humor.
Anarchic, heady, dark, Berg is Quin's masterpiece, a classic of post-war avant-garde British writing, and now finally back in print after much demand.