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Book Night Show and Tell
February 12, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm
What we do: Bring a book that you would like to talk about. Anything goes–as long as it’s not a book you wrote yourself! It can be one you’re reading right now, one you’ve just read, or one you read long ago. The main thing is to bring something you think is worth sharing. Fiction or non-fiction–your choice.
1. Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey
2. The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
3. Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers
Patricia Lockwood’s fabulous LRB review of Lying Life of Adults:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n04/patricia-lockwood/i-hate-nadia-beyond-reason
Sample paragraph:
What passes for the next thousand pages, between these harmless pastel covers? Life, all of it. Say any character’s name to me – say Pinuccia, and I will flash on her at the beach, pregnant, in love with a boy who isn’t the father, faced with the intolerable prospect of the future she has chosen, drinking coconut so her child will not be born craving it. Donato? I know where all his freckles are. Nadia? Allow me to direct you to the line in my notebook that reads: ‘I hate Nadia beyond all reason.’ In Frantumaglia, Ferrante writes: ‘The as yet unsurpassed force of literature lies in its capacity to construct vibrating bodies from whose veins anyone can drink.’ For a thousand pages we drink, body after body after body, husbands and daughters and teachers and friends, we drink directly from the neck of Naples. And we do it through the character of the writer, Elena Greco (Lenù), who is driven to master fiction as an organising force, a way of ‘finally putting everything back on its feet in the proper way’.