Readers, doors are now open through January 3 for the winter season of the MMD Book Club.
Reading is a solitary act, but there’s so much to be gained by reading together. Our one-of-a-kind online community makes it easy to connect with fellow bookish kindred spirits for fun, for encouragement, and for a more fulfilling reading experience. If you want to get more out of your reading life in 2018, and want encouragement and companionship on the journey, this may be the place for you this year.
We now open membership just several times a year, because it helps us focus on welcoming new members when the time is right, and providing the best possible experience for our members the other 48 or so weeks of the year.
Each month in Book Club we read one core title together, plus complementary, optional selections that create a “book flight.” We also offer quarterly classes (on topics like book journaling, utilizing library services, and improving your #bookstagram game) and regular Book Club 101 sessions to help you get more out of your reading like, and more out of the MMD Book Club.
This year I also had the pleasure of meeting up with many of you in person at our organized meet-ups, and seeing many of you get together in different parts of the country. We’ll do this more in 2018! Book people are the best people, and meeting you in person has been such a joy.
JANUARY:
We’ll kick off the new year with Cal Newport’s inspiring and timely Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, a book that takes a hard look at what modern technology is doing to our brains, and what we should do about it.
We’re pairing this with Mason Currey’s excellent and evergreen collection Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. You’ll want both these books for your personal library—or, in the case of Currey’s lovely hardcover, perhaps your coffee table.
Our January Book Club 101 session will take place on January 4, and later this month I’ll teach an updated course on reading journaling (books, bullets, and more). The class is included free with your Book Club membership.
FEBRUARY:
We’ll read Maggie O’Farrell’s satisfying 2016 family saga This Must Be the Place, one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time. This is the story of an unlikely but successful marriage between a floundering American professor and a British film star who hated the limelight so much she faked her own death and disappeared … until an unexpected bit of news, twenty years old but newly discovered, threatens to unravel everything. Family stories are commonplace in fiction, but I love this one for its intricate plotting, nuanced characters, true-to-life feel, and ultimate hopefulness.
Our flight pick is Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, an excellent companion for its similarly gentle navigation of fraught relationships, plus its huge discussability factor.
Membership in the MMD Book Club costs $10 per month and registration is quick, easy, and secure. Click here to join us this winter.
Happy reading, everyone!
