Join us for Rotating Reads Book Club, a reading group that explores fiction, non-fiction, memoir/biography and classics every first Thursday of the month. For a fun twist, one of these months will also be a freestyle "book report" where everyone reads something different, and shares what they read with the group.
Every month, a different volunteer will serve as the “host”. Their role will be to select the book, guide the discussion, and bring any fun insights or background about the author or genre.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire!
For the month of January, Rotating Reads Book Club is on the Fiction round! Join your hosts, Melanie and Erin, to discuss Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, an exploration on readers’ relationship to authors such as Virginia Woolf and artists like Michael Jackson.
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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NATIONAL BESTSELLER
From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, Monsters is “part memoir, part treatise, and all treat” (The New York Times). This unflinching, deeply personal book expands on Claire Dederer’s instantly viral Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?"
Can we love the work of artists such as Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Polanski, or Picasso? Should we? Dederer explores the audience's relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss?
Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.