We’re going back to read the books we read as children. An adult picked every one of them and put it in our hands, and I want to inspect them and see what the adults wanted us to be learning. I also want to know if the message I took away at nine is the same one I’d take away now. It doesn’t matter if you read it then. You can read it now and come to the conversation fully prepared.
That’s the Permanent Retrograde Book Club, and 2027 is the investigation. One book a month.
It was supposed to start in January. Then Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature and waiting felt insane, so we’re starting now with one book for adults. The first book is Eros the Bittersweet. Carson published it in 1986. It’s special and it’s important and it’s short enough that everyone can finish it.
We meet live on Substack on Friday, December 11 at 6 PM Pacific. I’ll bring a couple of you on screen at a time to say what you thought, and everyone else can fight in the chat.
The rules:
Read the book. Or enough of it to defend an opinion.
No summarizing. We all read it.
Hating the book is allowed. Saying why is required.
I pick the books.
Here are two from the 2027 list.
The Road from Home
An Armenian girl from a comfortable family in Turkey is deported in 1915 and walks out of a genocide that takes almost everyone she loves.
I read this around 1987. Why was a first-person account of a genocide in the children’s section, with a medal on it, when the genocide itself wasn’t in our history books? What did they want a ten-year-old to do with it? It ends with Veron, sixteen, sailing to America to marry a man she has never met, and the book treats that as the happy part.
Heaven
The oldest daughter of the poorest family in the West Virginia hills watches her father sell his children, and she’s one of them.
No adult gave us this one. So who was it for? It had a pretty girl on the cover and a peekaboo window, it sat on the rack at the drugstore, and every twelve-year-old I knew had read it. Every grown-up who takes Heaven in wants something from her. What did we learn from V.C. Andrews that the school books were leaving out, and was she warning us or entertaining us with it?
The book club is for paid subscribers. A subscription gets you into the live meeting for Eros the Bittersweet in December and all twelve next year, with the chance to come on screen and say your piece. If you miss one, the recording is yours. You get the full 2027 list with the month for every book, so you can start reading ahead. You also get every essay I publish here, all the way to the end.
The other ten months, the month each one falls in, and the most important book I read as a child are below.
