July Meeting
Books: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, and James, by Percival Everett
When: July 17, 2024
Where: Zoom
RSVP: To petergreenfield@msn.com by July 14 to request the Zoom link.

“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the critic Lionel Trilling wrote, is 'one of the world’s great books and one of the central documents of American culture,' in part because it grows with its readers. Mark Twain’s 1884 novel is a catapulting adventure story when one is 10, but its amplitude is grasped only in adulthood. . . Percival Everett’s majestic new novel, James, goes several steps further. Everett flips the perspective on the events in Huckleberry Finn. He gives us the story as a coolly electric first-person narrative in the voice of Jim, the novel’s enslaved runaway. . . .

"What sets 'James' above Everett’s previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up. This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful. Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being."

– Dwight Garner, "Huck Finn Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too," New York Times, March 28, 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/books/review/percival-everett-james.html

Reading group discussions start at 7:30 p.m. and generally end by 9:30 p.m. Anyone who has read the month’s selection is invited to take part. New participants are welcome, and no long-term commitment is required. This month’s meeting will be held by videoconference using Zoom. To preserve the character of the reading-group conversation, participation is limited to the first ten people who request a link.

Read a list of the books discussed by the group through February 2024 in our PDF document.
PDF link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VE_9381tplpOqf-4BST3yzNr-AAaEfxE/view