Question.

Should this be a website instead?

Book clug book list.

Anyone remember the order? 

Our First Book

The Human Stain by Phillip Roth (consensus)

And Then There Were…

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (Jon)

Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan (Jon)

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (Jon)

Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac (Jon)

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (Dan)

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (Dan)

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (Dan)

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (Dan)

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (Andrew)

Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, Denise

Scott-Brown (Michael)

The Visit and End of the Game by Friedrich Durrenmatt (Michael)

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Michael)

Night Games by Arthur Schnitzler (Michael)

The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years by Bernard 

Lewis (Sarah)

Them by Joyce Carol Oates (Sarah)

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (Sarah)

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon (Sarah)

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (Barbara)

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (Barbara)

The Human Comedy by William Saroyan (Barbara)

Saturday by Ian McEwan (Barbara)

About Schmidt by Louis Begley (Geoff)

The Big Laugh by John O'Hara (Geoff)

Aloft by Chang-Rae Lee (Geoff)

Snow by Orhan Pamuk (Geoff)

Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe (Tara)

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan (Michal)

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (Michal)

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Michal)

A Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Howells (Jamie)

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor (Jamie)

The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth (Jamie)

Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago (Jamie)

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (consensus)

Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabakov (consensus)

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (consensus)

The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq (consensus)

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (consensus)

The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges (consensus)

White Noise by Don DeLillo (consensus)

Book clug history. Malleable.

We were smart. We were young. We were searching for each other.

IT was the year 2000. A lot of us had recently moved to Los Angeles.

Michael and Sarah had their December 2000 holiday party. Book Clug was born on their patio. Overlooking the rest homes on Hayworth, between arguments and wine, rumblings of a desire for something bigger, something better were heard. A place to go for more arguments and more wine, but with a purpose. A literary purpose. Intellectual something. Yearnings. That is where things start.

Jon had met Dan and Jennie and Michal at GoodMachine in NYC.

Michal introduced Barbara to Jon.

Jon met Andrew Zee at some Francophile thing in Los Angeles.

Andrew introduced Michael and Sarah to Jon.

Jamie and Geoff appeared, like Manna.

Jon is the hub of the Book Clug. Like the center of a bicycle wheel, but human.

So, at this party, on the porch, the Book Clug was first mentioned. Jon was there. Sarah was there. Michael was there. Andrew Zee was there. Barbara was there.

The initial meeting was at Jon’s apartment on Flores. Initiating members were: Jon, Michael, Andrew Zee, Barbara, Geoff, Sarah, Jamie, and Dan. And some other chick, Amanda was there as well. But she turned out to be a Bad Fit, and never returned.

First Book: The Human Stain

And the Book Clug was, never to be rubbed out. Like a [human] stain on the carpet of life.

Second meeting: Laughter in the Dark, at Zee’s place in Santa Monica.

Michal’s first meeting; she was newly arrived from NYC. Michael and Sarah brought strawberries. Michal wore leather pants, and Jamie hasn’t stopped talking about them since.

Picking books back then was by consensus. All done through email, and a mutual decision would somehow be eked out. This process led to Book #3: Fathers and Sons. It was then realized that consensus would lead us further and further into classics, and only classics. A new method began: Alphabetically by last name, each person would nominate a few books and we’d vote by order of preference. Mostly that worked.

Jamie was (according to Sarah) the first person to reveal the flaws in the decision making process. He nominated a bunch of rather dry late nineteenth century novels and somehow A Hazard of New Fortunes was chosen. Not even Barbara read it. Dan actually did read it. He was in NYC and thought it would be ever so clever to read the book while there. Other famous book tragedies were Lost Illusions (Jon), and The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years (Sarah).

The emergence of Celebrity as an essential portion of the Book Clug event:

It was introduced by Jon. Quickly became an important facet in the Book Clug evening. Celebrity plugs into that primal place in each of us, releasing us from the bonds of common courtesy. We revert to a Hobbesian state - unrestrained, selfish, and uncivilised competition. Only to return after one, two, or sometimes three rounds of celebrity. Hours and hours have been lost to playing celebrity and the rules surrounding it. There have been complaints from “neighbors”.

Some in Book Clug yell just to yell. Some actually get angry.

Book Clug will never be held in a Restaurant.

In order for a clue to be valid, at least one person on each team must recognize the clue. This has led to some of the greatest known clues in the history of celebrity, in no particular order:

Pam Bonnano

Alf

Cookie Puss

Betsy Ellenberg

And the pinnacle of all pinnacles:

Jon’s girlfriend who was raped by a ghost.

Lessons from Book Clug Celebrity:

Know thy partners.

When making teams, Always Put Michael and Jon on the Same Team.

In the Fall of 2001, Michael’s nomination Learning From Las Vegas was chosen. Amazingly, everyone agreed to hold the meeting in Las Vegas on the weekend of September 21^st to talk about it in its natural setting. (except for Geoff, he couldn’t go)

But then we had 9/11 and we had to stay home.

What can be said about 9/11 in the context of a Book Clug history? We all sat together in Michal’s apartment, watching the day unfold, making phone calls.

We wound up talking about the book on the lawn of the Griffith Park Observatory. There, the first class photo was taken [insert photo].

Not long after that, the great reverse migration began. Zee moved to NYC. He was missed terribly, and everyone wished to have Andrew back. The wish was granted, in a way. Andrew Ehrlich joined in early 2002, having come to LA to work as a Judges Clerk for a year. Among many useful qualities was his talent in the Charades portion of celebrity. Oh, the joy of watching Andrew Ehrlich or Geoff perform Shadow Date or Jon’s girlfriend who was raped by a ghost. You haven’t lived.

It was during the early 2003 discussions of the Durenmatt writings in the Johnstonberg’s apartment on Blackburn that Michael told us we were a bunch of “Nihilist Bon Vivants”. Why he said it? What does it mean? How does one react?

Nihilist Bon Vivants. Things like that don’t just go away.

Moments later, he was talking about a movie he had seen, where every time someone was killed a certain song played.

“Da Da Da”, he sung. “Da Da Da!” Jamie chanted.

“Nihilist Bon Vivants!” shouted the other side.

Each team has its name.

There are Rules in the Book Clug.

Barbara mistyped Book Club in an email one day. Book Clug was born.

Andrew E. left, to return to NYC in 2003. We wished and wished again for him to return. Instead of a new Andrew, we received Tara (pronounced Tara, like a Tart, which is what she usually brings to each Book Clug meeting) in 2004.

Michal and Jon both left in 2005, like the two Andrews before them, they moved to NYC. In their stead, we got Ashley at the start of 2006. A transplant from NYC herself.

And still we grow.

Barbara married Gabriel, who was introduced to her through the Book Clug’s Dan & Jennie) [link to photo]

Dan & Jennie had twins! Born July 8, 2005, Berkeley Julian and Zoe Olivia [link to photo]. They can’t read yet, but they can’t talk yet either.

And Book Clug East, born of all those who prefer that East Coast. Jon, Michal, Andrew, and a growing family of book yellers in that city over there.

The family is strong, our words are loud, and we just keep growing.

DaDaDa!

the new book clug emeritus blog.

It's over, but that's not absolute.

Watch here for updates.