Book clubbed

Book clubs everywhere. Which one to choose?

Hello friends!

I seem to have accumulated a few new subscribers of late, so today I offer a brief (re)introduction to my newsletter and then a bit of a round-up of book groups currently on my radar. All your burning questions are answered below.

Who are you and why am I reading this?

(Cue smoke machine, dim lights) I am Tash; an ordinary woman with an internet connection.

You are reading this because you subscribed to Wolfish!, either willingly or by accident. Or perhaps you didn’t subscribe but had fifty tabs open in your browser and, unaccountably, one of them was this post. However you came to be here— either striding in with relish or falling in backwards — welcome!

Mostly I write about books and the writings of Virginia Woolf and that sort of thing. Sometimes I write about embarrassing moments in my personal life. Shortly, I will lead a readalong of Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse.

Should I join the To the Lighthouse readalong?

Yes, you should. To the Lighthouse is a flipping masterpiece.

We will read the book during the month of February (spilling into early March). As I am very busy and important,¹ I’m only able to run this reading group intermittently. The last book we did was Mrs Dalloway (you can find all the posts here). I suppose one thing to say is that my readalongs are short, sharp and infrequent! I’m not sure if that makes them appealing (scarce resource!) or unappealing (too scarce!) — but there you have it. Drop in any time — it doesn’t have to be February.

If you do want to read with me, the reading schedule is here.

Are you qualified to lead this Woolf reading group?

No. But I am very charming.

Are there better book clubs on substack than yours?

Yes. Orders of magnitude better.

And there are plenty to choose from. It’s a real bag of lollies for all you readers out there. My tastes skew heavily towards classics over contemporary fiction so that influences the book groups I tend to be interested in. Anyway, here are a few of them (in no particular order):

Dostoevsky

Dana • Dostoevsky Bookclub

is running a year-long slow read of The Brothers Karamazov. Dana is wonderful. Her posts are informative and interesting. And she is organised! — as you have to be for a year-long readalong. The reading schedule is here if you’re interested. And if you get a chance, why not take a look at some of the beautiful drawings Dana did to accompany her reading of Crime and Punishment last year.

Chaucer

John Halbrooks

is running a Chaucer reading challenge in 2025 which will cover the poetic dream visions, The Canterbury Tales, and Troilus and Criseyde. I’m a new subscriber to John’s newsletter —

Personal Canon Formation

— but I do think these sorts of reading groups are a real gift because they introduce us to writing that might be inaccessible without some expert guidance. John teaches a graduate course on Chaucer, I believe, so you’re in good hands.

Chaucer can be difficult for modern readers because his oeuvre comes to us in Middle English which can sound nearly German at times to our modern ears. And yet, so much is lost reading a translation. Better to read the original if possible under the tutelage of someone who knows their stuff. Chaucer was one of the first to write in English rather than French or Latin, which were the dominant literary languages in England at that time. Our English literary inheritance more or less starts with him.

You can find out about the Chaucer Reading Challenge here. The first work John will be covering is The Book of the Duchess.

Austen

haley larsen, phd

is reading Pride and Prejudice starting right about now!

Henry Eliot

is reading Persuasion in February. And

Henry Oliver

is reading all of Austen’s novels in 2025 and hosting meetings online (via video conferencing) throughout the year to discuss them. What Austen plenty!

Wharton

Alyssa aka Nerdy Nurse Reads

is reading the novels of Edith Wharton in 2025, starting with The House of Mirth. Wharton is fantastic; if you want a masterclass in sustained, perfectly calibrated suspense and storytelling, read (and be devastated by) Ethan Frome.

haley larsen, phd

’s book club covered The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence last year (her posts on those books are available to paid subscribers).

And while we’re talking about Edith Wharton, it would be remiss of me not to mention

PartTimeLady

(aka Olivia Ciacci) who is currently working on a novel about the life of Wharton (I think) and publishes bits and pieces unearthed during her research via her newsletter. Most recently, she wrote about the guy buried next to Wharton. Olivia’s writing is always an absolute joy — informative, entertaining, at times laugh-out-loud funny.²

Pirandello, Morante, Eco

Ellie

runs a book club focused on Italian literature. In 2025, she will be reading One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello first, followed by Arturo’s Island, by Elsa Morante, and then The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t read a lot of literature in translation, so it was a real pleasure to be introduced to The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa by Ellie last year and to read along with her. (All of Ellie’s posts on The Leopard are here if you want to take a look.)

Tolstoy

Book Group Titan,

Simon Haisell

, will again be running his year-long reading of War and Peace and this year

Henry Eliot

will be running a year-long reading of Anna Karenina. (Simon will also being running the ‘Wolf Crawl,’ now in its second year — a year-long read of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. Last year, I tuned in for the final book (The Mirror and the Light). I am still staggering to the finish line! But Simon’s weekly posts really added to the experience. And he is reading a few other things besides: all of Simon’s book clubs are listed here.)

How can I choose? What do you, Tash, advise?

I advise reading what interests you (not what you feel obliged to read) but also being a bit ambitious. And if you do join a book group, be very, very nice to the person running the group — often they are delivering their services free of charge.

And, while the demand for my advice is brisk, let me also advise checking out the following newsletters on substack which I seem to be reading a lot of lately:

• Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society by

  Ann Kennedy Smith
  (writes with style and smarts on all the subjects I’m interested in; beautiful photographs of Cambridge!)

• Economical with Fiction by

  E.J. Barnes
  (one of those excellent people with knowledge in two fields not often married together — economics and fiction; interested in literature from the 1920s and 30s — yes!)

• Woman of Letters by

  Naomi Kanakia
  (reflects back at me many of my own thoughts and opinions about bookish matters, but much (much) more intelligently and articulately; interested in the Great Books)

• Public Things Newsletter by

  Matthew Lamb
  (fantastic series of posts on The Plague by Albert Camus (which I am slowly working my way through); the piece on Camus’ rules for journalism in dark and oppressive times is very good)

• Laura Thompson’s Substack by

  laura thompson
  (all of Laura’s essays are great, but the ones I enjoy most are the ones on film and TV — her recent countdown of best and worst Agatha Christie adaptations was excellent!)

• Mind Flexing by

  Alia Parker
  (has a talent for landing on fascinating subjects and exploring them thoughtfully; beautiful series on how to change the world)

Finally, to anyone mentioned in this post…

Sometimes name-checking people in a post like this can feel sort of passive aggressive or something — like, well I said nice things about you to my subscribers so I expect something in return, pay up buster! — a quid pro quo, as it were. This scenario is made worse, somehow, when a person name-checks publications with a lot more subscribers — a sort of brazen attempt to ride on their coattails perhaps. It’s all a bit weird and yuck. But this can make it difficult to say, frankly, with no agenda (as I am trying to here!): I really like these newsletters, or bookish substacks, or writers, and I think you will too!

Anyway. This is just to say: there is no quid pro quo; I want nothing; I like and appreciate all these newsletters and book clubs; my intentions are honourable!

Thank you for your attention! (And see some of you in February for To the Lighthouse!)

1. To my children. Otherwise, not very important.

2. The conversation Olivia relates in which she misunderstands her husband’s German-inflected English completely cracked me up.