Welcome

I'm a book group junkie -- a paperback floozy, if you will (and bless you for trying if you did), though down on his luck and not as pretty as the other, younger floozies. I belong to two, one in Bethesda, and one in D.C. And they're really my only connection to contemporary literature. Left to my own devices, I'd still be blissfully unaware of Jonathan Lethem and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

See, for me the best novels have a bustle, a beau, a hand or two of whist, and a complicated plot involving a governess who's really the mother of the mill owner -- only she's had to disguise her identity lo these many years because of something to do with Methodists and a case of consumption.

Hence: this book group.

It's a planned book group, meaning that the novels have already been chosen -- and there's a method there, believe it or not. I thought it would be interesting to take a sampling of 19th century writers -- Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy -- and track their novels, starting with their first, moving on to a middle, and then reading their last novel. In this way, we'll not only get a chance to see how each writer develops as an artist, but how the time itself helped develop the author.

At least, I'm hoping that's what'll happen. Our first meeting will be Tuesday, January 16, at 7:15 p.m. at the Bethesda Library.

I don't have any credentials for this. I'm not a professor of any kind, or a frustrated English Lit major looking to prove a point about post-colonialism and sexual imagery in Victorian piano legs. I'm just a guy who likes Austen and Trollope and Dickens.

If you'd like more information, or if you want to be included in the periodic mailings list, send me an email: mbevel2002 at yahoo dot com.

Reading List and Schedule

Starting January 16, 2007:

JANE AUSTEN
January 16: Northanger Abbey

February 20: Mansfield Park

March 20: Persuasion

WILKIE COLLINS
April 17: Basil

May 15: No Name

June 19: Blind Love

GEORGE ELIOT
July 17: Adam Bede

August 21: Silas Marner

September 18: Daniel Deronda

THOMAS HARDY
October 16: Desperate Remedies

November 20: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

December 18: Jude the Obscure