Back at the beginning of May, I mentioned that Liber Astarte vel Berylli sub figura CLXXV was recently cataloged at Goodreads and that I would be thinking about ways that the new author profile I’ve ended up with might be used to help promote the materials at the library. So, I started to think about what, if anything, would be sensible, ethical and aesthetic to do. I settled on the idea of doing a book club. Although I mentioned this idea in passing on twitter and pointed to this over on the facebook page, while I was away over the last month I started the book club with a first selection. Now I’m just trying to catch up on everything!
I am today making the official announcement that I’ve started a new, and still quite experimental, Hermetic Library book club. I made the first selection back in May, but wasn’t able to mention it until now, so I apologize for the short notice; but, I’ve wanted to read René Daumal’s Mount Analogue for quite a long time, and so I decided that would be first.
The Hermetic Library book club is for people interested a living Western Esoteric Tradition. The book selections will be wide ranging and may be from many genres, including fiction and non-fiction. Generally speaking the book selections will be related to the subject matter of the Hermetic Library, but this is a book club not a study group or an online teaching order of any kind. The online discussion group for the Hermetic Library book club will be over at Goodreads, and I’ll work on expanding things there over time.
Seriously, I bought this book back in 2004 and just haven’t gotten around to it. That I’ve had this book on my quite ridiculously high stack of “to read” books is actually one of the reasons I’m excited about the book club. Another reason is that I’ve been really missing the kind of engagement with others around particular texts that I remember from my undergraduate days. I’ll do more to create some basic guidelines and suggestions specifically for the book club over time, as things get rolling, but I am pretty likely going to base my vision and aspiration for the group on the idea of what a seminar was at my undergrad institution and book response outline from one of my courses. That’s not to say that I expect the discussion to and so forth to be academic, but it’s where I’m coming from when I think about a book club. I’m sure things will evolve over time and my idea will change some, but there it is.
I’ll probably also just make selections from my “to read” stack to begin with, but I’m actually hoping to have people participate that will not only have their own ideas about selections but also who want to participate as discussion leaders for some selections.
Anyhow, I’ve really not had much chance to get the idea sorted, so I’m just going to leap in and start reading books I’ve wanted to read and hope that people are interested in joining in. So, come on over and participate in the new Hermetic Library book club and the discussions about René Daumal’s Mount Analogue!