Invitation to the August Book Club: "Tales of the City" by Armistead Maupin

Who: Everyone who wants to!

What: Reading and talking about Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin!

When: August!

Where: Here!

Why: Because!

How: See below for details!

Exclamation marks: I'll stop using them now.


This is to announce the first book of hopefully many group readalongs here on EC.

If you don't know anything about the book, well, it's a classic in the LGBTQ community and I'll just quote the back of my copy to help give a little summary:

My copy is a little old (50 cents at a booksale!) so I should add that the series eventually became 9 novels and was also turned into a musical.

Other book clubs have been tried here before but for some reason none ever really took off. I'm hoping the magic will come together this time and as some have already expressed interest I think it will turn out to be quite fun!

A few things to point out:

• since it's an LGBT classic (meaning "old") it should hopefully be available in plenty of paperback editions from libraries, new and used book stores, as well as e-book and audio versions (also available at libraries).

• it's almost 400 pages BUT every chapter is very short (1-5 pages each) and the book looks to be 80% dialogue

• the audiobook version is only 7.5 hours long so it shouldn't be too time consuming a read (or listen) over a few weeks (to compare: each Hunger Games book is 11 hours on audio, The Fault in Our Stars is 7.25 hours on audio, Will Grayson, Will Grayson is almost 8 hours on audio, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower is 6.5 hours on audio)

• it has a reputation for being fun, lively, and just all around entertaining

I posted before about whether or not a book club was a good idea and got some enthusiastic responses, so now this post is more about letting people know that there will be a club and what we'll be reading.

A little about how it will work:

• The book will be broken up into 4 sections

• every Friday in August a new thread will be posted to discuss the next section

• the first discussion will start on August 7, 2015 so that gives everyone about two weeks to find a copy and read the first section

A few more details to come but for now, if you're at all interested, respond below with your yesses or questions.

Thanks!

(okay, one last exclamation point)

 

Super! I hope everyone who gets their copy from the library won't have any problems renewing them as time goes by.

And yeah, with my copy it would be about every 90 pages or so, but I'd be really surprised if all our different copies have the same page numbers (but here's hoping they do! :eusa_pray). The book has 115 chapters total but they're not numbered, only individually titled. I'll post the breakdown in full later but the first section will be chapters 1-26 (from "Taking the Plunge" to "...And Many Happy Returns") which is pages 1-92 in my copy.

I hope you can find it---keep us posted!

In fact, everyone who gets their copy, please let us know so we can see who's in this for realz!

 

Yes, join! I just thought of some fun "extras" to bring into the mix of reading and discussing, and only by coming along for the ride will you find out what they are!