Questions for the James Baldwin book club

A few things we'll talk about at the first night of "Giovanni's Room."

The one on the left I’ve read so many times the pages are weak with my handwriting. So I decided to get a fresh copy.

UPDATE: This club has already begun but if you sign up late, you’ll get recordings of what you’ve missed.

Tomorrow night is the start of the James Baldwin book club. We're reading Giovanni's Room, a short novel — a romance, a tragedy, and a mystery/thriller all in one — set in Paris. 

It’s one of the most interesting and audacious novels of the 20th century. Of the hundred books I read in grad school, it made it into my own personal top five.

I also think that most readers — and many literature teachers — miss the deeper layer of the book, miss what it’s really about. 

So I have a passion for it, and I can’t wait to dive back in.

In my marginalia, a checkmark means I like something, a star means I love something, and a “ha” means I laughed.

Tomorrow in book club, we’ll look at the first few paragraphs of the novel and share our observations about them.

Then I’ll talk about Baldwin’s life and the conditions under which he wrote Giovanni’s Room—a book that everyone in the publishing industry told him not to write and not to publish.

Then we’ll have open discussion.

Open discussion is always optional; people raise their hands if they want to speak; no one is forced to participate. The discussion questions for tomorrow’s club just went out via email to everyone signed up, so if you didn’t get those, you must not be signed up.

(If you want to sign up, sign up here. You do not need to have a copy of the book, or read anything in advance, to enjoy the first meeting. But get a copy of the book too: this is the edition we’re reading.)

The discussion questions

For Substack subcribers: If you’ve never been in a FrizzLit book club and you’re wondering what kinds of things we talk about during open discussion, here’s an example.

These are the questions for tomorrow’s meeting, designed to get us into the atmosphere and mood of Giovanni’s Room, and also to get to know each other a little:

1. Have you ever been to Paris? If so, what was your favorite thing you did in Paris?

2. Do you ever feel like you were born in the wrong era? If so, why?

3. Have you ever been involved in a love triangle? If so, how’d that work out? 

4. Is there a tragedy — maybe from opera, Shakespeare, mythology, or the movies — that sticks in your mind and keeps on fascinating you? What is it about that story for you?

Do you write in your books? I do. Evidently I read it once with a pencil in my hand, once with a black ballpoint pen, and once with a blue ballpoint pen.

Some book-club regulars have already read Giovanni’s Room with me because it was the second novel we read in our Zoom book club during the early days of the pandemic.

The reason I am returning to it right now is because it’s part of a secret writing project I’m working on.

If you’d like to join us for this club but you can’t make the meetings on Monday at 6 pm Pacific, you should know that meetings are automatically recorded and sent out to all ticketholders via links sent to your email.

Many book club members enjoy FrizzLit book clubs by reading the book and watching those recordings on their own time.

How to join

You need a ticket. Financial assistance is available. You don’t need to read anything before the first meeting, or even have a copy of Giovanni’s Room, but you should get yourself a copy of the book because you’ll need it to do the reading for next week. This is the edition we’re reading. Get that and you’ll have the same page numbers as everyone else during discussions.