Over the last twenty years I have led book discussions at Cincinnati’s Mercantile Library, sometimes during the fall, other times in the Spring, and some years both. The usual plan has been to read four books over a course of a couple of months and meet once for each book at the Mercantile downtown. Post pandemic, we have hybrid meetings, with those who wish coming downtown to the library and those who want to dial in via Zoom attending that way. The somewhat quaint rubric for the courses has been “Literary Journeys” as the courses have tended to be geographically organized. We have ranged all over the world—Japan, China, Scandinavia, Spain, England and France, England and the USA, and have hit different eras and centuries. One of my favorites was Russia in the 19th Century, when we focused on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Another was the 19th Century in England and France, when we did Dickens and Eliot, Stendhal and Balzac. Wide ranging as you can see. Another was a John Updike retrospective when we focused on four books of the master just after he died.

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This year we did a sequence on great American women writers, starting with Emily Dickinson and ending with Willa Cather.  In Fall, 2024 we are journeying to the subconscious,  starting with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, then Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,  and finishing with a deep dive into William Faulkner’s   The Sound and the Fury.