Read with me

A reading journal! A book club!

I read a lot, both professionally – I’m a classical singer getting a doctorate in music and have recently started writing my dissertation – and simply for pleasure. Often, there’s no clear delineation between the two sides of the spectrum: a lot of my “non-required” reading informs my performance and academic careers, and I find personal enjoyment in many academic papers I read for my research or writing. 

There’s an official purpose to this academic reading, and as such, a readily available template of how I might execute and use it. But for several years I’ve also been playing with the shape of that other, extra reading. Do I want to be distracted? Do I want to learn? How much do I want to engage with the material, and in what way? Most of my activities around these questions are solitary. I underline passages, take notes, write responses, ruminate. Two years ago, I started a YouTube channel to talk about what I was reading. I wanted both to look outside of myself, joining a community of other readers, and more deeply inward, challenging myself to put the dashes of thoughts about my rapidly increasing pile of freshly read books into coherent words.  

I’m adding a new facet to the project of my reading life by launching a monthly book club. In many ways, it’s a continuation and a refining of what I’ve been doing already: reading books, thinking about them, sharing some of those thoughts with others, hoping to get theirs in response. I’m starting this Substack for many of the same reasons as I did my book channel, but I want to go farther. I want to engage more deeply with certain books on a personal level, and I want to engage more with other people. I want to get into the weeds of certain texts in ways that my YouTube doesn’t allow. And I want to do it with you.

So, what will the bibliosophie book club be? Here are some details:

1. It will be free to subscribe and public. 

2. I’ll choose a book each month and post regularly (the goal is weekly) about the process of reading and digesting it: passages that interest me, marginalia, responses, contextual research, translation notes when applicable, further reading lists and music/film/visual art associations.

3. This Substack will be both a scrapbook/open reading journal and the main center of discussion with others. You can engage with it as actively or passively as you want. You can use this book club as a pretext to read something you might not have otherwise and never tell me about it. You can comment publicly on posts with your own notes/associations/recommendations. You can use the subscriber chat function to connect with other readers more informally.

4. I’ll pick both fiction and nonfiction books, predominantly backlist. 

5. This Substack will be in English, and I’ll be delving into books in that language, but some of these will be in translation. Specifically, because I’m French, and a lot of my work deals with language and translation, I plan to include some French books translated into English — in those cases, I’ll read and talk about the original as well as the translation.

This project will start in July – I’ll announce the book next week. Let’s read together!