The Inklings

Back in the good old days, you may remem­ber, when I first bought this domain and blogged all the time, I was a mem­ber of a book club. I loved it so much, even when I hated the book we read. I loved to blog about what we were read­ing at the time.

Since start­ing to work from home, I have keenly been miss­ing adult inter­ac­tion. Specif­i­cally talk­ing to peo­ple about things that mat­ter, and while trolling the net for like minds is all well and good, I have plenty of friends who love good lit­er­a­ture, and we’re always talk­ing about how the other should read this book or how we need to get together to dis­cuss another book. It just rarely hap­pens, so I took it upon myself to try and recre­ate some of that this year.

I decided that instead of wish­ing some­one would form the per­fect book club — filled with diverse per­son­al­i­ties like Chris, Jeff, Home­birth Honey, and Sarah, I would make it hap­pen myself. Since I already know every­one involved, I am a lot less likely to chicken out, any­way. So I invited 9 peo­ple, and asked them to invite any­one they wanted to join. Every­one in the group is a reader, though some of us sim­ply do not make the time to read that we should.

Our first book is Foucault’s Pen­du­lum by Umberto Eco.  Some of you know I’ve been ghost­writ­ing a book about con­spir­acy the­o­ries (just in time for 2012!) and I really like Umberto Eco.  I guess that is what appealed to me, since it’s on my mind, and I’m not about to waste anyone’s time on The Da Vinci Code.  Also, this book kept com­ing up on many of the “Best of” lists — Best SciFi nov­els, 100 Must Read nov­els, Best books of the 20th Cen­tury.  With such a large group, com­ing up with some­thing that the major­ity of us has not read was a challenge.

The name of the group comes from the orig­i­nal Inklings of Oxford, a lit­er­ary soci­ety which included both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.The orig­i­nal Inklings have inspired me through­out the years, both indi­vid­u­ally and as a group. Still, I don’t know half of those authors half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of them half as well as they deserve.  Or… some­thing along those lines. Per­haps this can help to change that.

If you can’t tell, I’m very excited about this. If noth­ing else, I hope to have, at the very least, 12 blog post top­ics for 2012, one for each book we read.