Last chance to join the Melville book club!!
The discussion questions for our first meeting have already been sent out
Rebecca Brown is leading the next FrizzLit book club, reading “Billy Budd” and other stories, and she’s already sent the day-one discussion questions out to everyone who’s signed up. If you didn’t get those in your email, you’re not signed up.
If you sign up now, the discussion questions will come automatically with your receipt and confirmation.
Kathryn Rathke, the illustrator who created these Melville portrait illustrations, will be in this club!
So will all the other artists, writers, actors, musicians, scientists, librarians — and people with normal jobs, too! — who frequent these clubs.
If you’re a new subscriber, here’s how book clubs work
We have a lot of new subscribers here — thanks to this chat I just had with John Hodgman, who was in our most recent book club — so here’s a quick explainer for the uninitiated:
Book clubs don’t come with your subscription. To join a book club, you have to buy a ticket for that club. We do about a dozen book clubs a year.
“Book clubs” are really “literature classes on Zoom,” except way more fun and rollicking than “literature classes on Zoom.”
Book clubs are taught by professionals — English professors — who prepare like crazy, and the ticket price pays them for their work.
We learn all about the author and the historical context for the work, plus all the allusions to religion and mythology and science, in addition to sharing our own personal responses to the text and doing activities like Symphony of Sentences together.
You don’t need to read anything before the first meeting
The discussion questions for day one are not about a specific story. They’re more about you, and your life, and connections between things you may have experienced and things Herman Melville experienced.
All meetings are recorded
All recordings are sent out to everyone who’s signed up within 24 to 48 hours of a live meeting concluding. About 25% of people in FrizzLit book clubs don’t come to the live meetings; they watch them later and read at their own pace.
Financial assistance
If you would like to join a club by the cost is prohibitive, financial assistance is available. FrizzLit scholarships are administered by former Seattle city librarian Deborah Jacobs.
