The Catherine Project‘s Hemingway reading group has decided to meet during the two break days scheduled for this summer, adding five short stories and the non-fiction work A Moveable Feast to our three-novel roster (The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Farewell to Arms). I’m complementing the reading with the three-part documentary series Hemingway. Similarly, I’m making my way through The Great Courses program The Theory of Evolution: A History of Controversy for the On the Origin of Species reading group. 

For this session of Night School Bar, I’m in the Mark Fisher’s Capital Realism reading group (previous reading groups: David Graeber’s Debt and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch).

For this season of The Readers Karamazov, I chose to read The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco), A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller), The Sign of Four (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), The Third Policeman (Flann O’Brien), and A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy O’Toole); next up, then, is Sign for the June 27 episode. (Again, if you’re not listening to this podcast, you must stop what you’re doing and subscribe. Witty and erudite.)

The number of #infinitejesttogether participants seems to be dwindling, which, according to several David Foster Wallace fans, is to be expected. I cannot, however, see a reason to give up now, nearly four hundred pages in, although, yes, I have likened the experience to attempting to assemble a 1,079-piece jigsaw puzzle without having seen the image on the front of the box.

I will resume my bible-in-a-year reading next month; but given how my participation in assorted groups / classes has reshaped my reading list, I have revised my other goals for this year: Read no fewer than 100 books from my personal library (i.e., books acquired before the end of 2021), including 25 or more non-fiction titles; at least one book from each of the following categories: Shakespeare (about and/or retold; the plays will not satisfy this category), poetry, NYRB, Kurt Vonnegut (by or about), Joyce Carol Oates, philosophy, art, and children’s / YA; and at least one book about my bird of the year (American Crow).