Book Club, May 2022

Hey folks,

Tomorrow we’re taking the horses to summer camp, where they will spend two months learning to tolt better and avoiding the heat in the mountains of Vermont. So right now I am suffering from Pending Thing, and it is taking all of my willpower to force myself to write this newsletter.

I definitely am doing better on the reading front at least, though fiction dysfunction still rules the roost around here.

Since last we spoke, I read A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, by George Saunders. (We talked about this one a little bit in the Discord.) I feel like most of the value in this book is actually in the first section, and after that it trails off. Saunders is great at close reading, but I’m afraid the 19th century Russians mostly leave me pretty cold, and the baked-in misogyny and classism of the source material was a little hard to get past. However, the conversation on how stories get structured and where theme comes from were worth the price of admission. After twenty years in this business I’m not sure I learned anything precisely new, but it never hurts to brush up.