We’re off to a murky gray morning here in the mountains. Last night my book club met, and we had a special guest, Katherine Min, author of Secondhand World. Katherine was inveigled to join us for the evening by one of our members who teaches with her at UNCA. As Tingle Alley readers will already know, my book club’s been meeting about eight years and in that time we’ve grown a little loose and informal in our approach: Currently there’s seven of us, and we meet at each other’s houses every month or so to drink, eat, gossip, and sometimes (but not always) discuss the assigned novel. We’ve never once assayed the questions for reading groups provided by publishers at the end of books; and we sometimes skip reading a book altogether in favor of an article or short story, and there is nothing satiric you can say about any of this that we haven’t already noted.
With Katherine as our guest, however, we mustered a slightly more on-point discussion, while also eating stew, crusty bread and plum crisp, and putting away serious amounts of red wine. I need to get some work done this morning, but wanted to point your attention to an excellent interview with Katherine at The Mumpsimus. She’ll be reading at Malaprop’s on Saturday, November 3rd — and if you live in Asheville, you should attend.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
