New? Introduce Yourself By Saying a Friendly Hello

[Leanne]

Thank you Kathleen! Me too, we can anxiously anticipate the next book together! I’m excited to see all the nominations, I’m already on the hunt for a nomination of my own!

[Darrin]

Welcome, Leanne.

[Yvonne]

Astonishing that it’s already soon time for another round of nominations. Looking forward!
Welcome, Leanne.
~Yvonne

[Danielle]

Hi. I like the books you guys are interested in, and also that some of your suggestions are unknown to me.

[Ken]

Welcome, Danielle. The more, the merrier (as a wise woman once said)!

[Leanne]

Thank you Yvonne and Darrin! Welcome Danielle :)

[Diane]

Welcome, Leanne and Danielle. We have great discussions as well as reading interesting books.

[Bionic Jean]

Hi and welcome Genise, Miriam, Scout and Leanne! Sorry for the delayed welcome - I seem to not be getting notifications from this thread :( Anyway, I hope you enjoy the group, and think we're all looking forward to thinking about the next obscure selection :)

[Sue]

Welcome to all I may have missed. You are here at a good time, to be involved with the next book selection.

[Sam]

Hello, I’m Sam. In Dorset, England - yes, Hardy county!

It’s twenty years since I read Hardy. Are there any votes for poor old Tess Durbeyfield? I did love that novel so much.
I’m feeling drawn back to Hardy and other classics lately. Middle age has made me irritable and intolerant of most contemporary literature, it seems.

I’m a former English teacher with a tendency to read crime novels. But that’s a bit like bingeing on crisps. You need a solid meal sometimes.

Pleased to be here. I think I shall read Tenant of Wildfell Hall on catch up. Seems a good place to begin.

[Ken]

Sam wrote: "Hello, I’m Sam. In Dorset, England - yes, Hardy county!

It’s twenty years since I read Hardy. Are there any votes for poor old Tess Durbeyfield? I did love that novel so much.
I’m feeling drawn ..."


Hello and welcome, Sam. Great to have you here. Another fellow English teacher here, though I've never been one for crime novels (or TV shows, though my wife loves them). Like you, I appreciate the back and forth from fun to challenging reads. As I've aged, I've gotten better at mixing it up. See? Old dogs can learn new tricks.

Anyway, I'm sure you'll enjoy the group we have here. If you go there, I hope you like Wildfell. In around two weeks, we'll start the nomination process for our June discussion, so there's that to look forward to!

[Darrin]

Welcome Sam.

[Sue]

Welcome to the group, Sam.

[Carol]

Hello , Sam . Happy reading

[Kathleen]

Welcome, Sam. Our "solid meal" reads go down pretty easy with excellent conversation, so looking forward to you joining in!

[Bionic Jean]

Hi Sam, and welcome :) I spend a good deal of my time in your county, wandering about the swannery, usually.

"Middle age has made me irritable and intolerant of most contemporary literature, it seems." Gosh, I know what you mean! Increasingly my comfort reading is Victorian classics ... though I do like English Mysteries :)

[Sam]

Thank you for the warm welcome! I look forward to the next read.

[Sam]

I am new to using groups on this platform so I need to figure out how it works and how to stay involved.

[Ken]

You'll get the hang of it, Sam. And if you have questions about using GR or the group, don't be shy about asking. We've all been there.

[Carol]

Been scouring around for the next obscure book.

[Ken]

Put your thinking caps on, people. Next week you'll get my message for ONE book nomination, should you desire to enter one.

[Paul]

I am delighted to join this book club. Many book clubs engage readers in one book a month but I am seldom interested in that particular book. I like the flexibility of one book every three months. It allows me to continue to pursue my own interests while also offering me a chance to discover a book or author I may not otherwise have discovered.
I love reading and usually complete 65 or more books a year while also reading selections from anthologies and collections and lots of quality online writing. Since I live near the beach in Southern California, a good book causes me to need a lot of sunblock. To me a book is good if it is well-written. I want a book with prose that is memorable and even quotable, a book that requires me to use a lot of highlighter pen and post-it flags. Of course, a good story or plot helps, too.
I think there are too few men who read anything other than non-fiction and I have a great deal of trouble finding books that are high-quality and have a masculine appeal.

[Ken]

Paul wrote: "I am delighted to join this book club. Many book clubs engage readers in one book a month but I am seldom interested in that particular book. I like the flexibility of one book every three months. ..."

Welcome, Paul, and I hope you enjoy the June choice and reading/discussion experience.

Tomorrow morning, ably assisted by a hot black coffee by my side, I will put together the poll to send to all our members.

If you still haven't sent a nominee and had been planning to, it's now or Never Never Land (tell Peter we said hi).

[Nilanjana]

Hi there Ken and members of the Obscure book club. Only today I could scratch up adequate time to come up and look deeper into this club. I am very grateful to be here, thanks to Fergus and Ken. I am from siliguri, West Bengal India. I am madly in love with literature—-I usually fall for a person’s style of writing and am drawn very easily to imaginary ramifications of the human mind, especially when allowed to drift on its own. I’m interested in what stories evolve out of that space.
More than that I love growing as a writer, by discovering novel manoeuvres around words of literature, like I discovered with Fergus’ writings and Ken’s fabulous book on poems, “The Indifferent World.” So I want to be baffled in my literary discoveries and have an endless scope for evolution.


Being in this club makes me feel like being as a part of “Dead Poets’ Society.” Even theirs was so obscure and hence special. Looking forward to June’s selection.

[Carol]

Welcome Nilanjana. This is a welcome change from most reading groups. It is amazing to see the thought processes going on.

[Kathleen]

Welcome Nilanjana, and what lovely thoughts! Great comparison to the Dead Poets Society. Carpe diem!

[Nilanjana]

Carol, thank you so much for your greetings

Kathleen, thank you so much for your greetings too. I am very glad to meet you. Can’t wait to discuss books with the both of you :) carpe diem!

[Ken]

Welcome to the group, Nilanjana. And thank you for such kind words. I haven't seen the Dead Poets since it came out at the movie theater. I don't even want to GUESS what year that was.

[Sandra]

Welcome, all new members. I can’t believe you haven’t seen The Dead Poets Society, Ken. I showed it in my high school poetry class each year and then we read our feeble attempts at poetry writing. It was great fun. The new book is sure to create an outstanding discussion!

[Ken]

Sandra wrote: "Welcome, all new members. I can’t believe you haven’t seen The Dead Poets Society, Ken. I showed it in my high school poetry class each year and then we read our feeble attempts at poetry writing. ..."

Oh, no. I *did* see it, but only once. When it was first released in the theaters. I refuse to look up the year because I know it's back, back, back!

[Sue]

I remember seeing it in the theater too, Ken. It does seem like it was in the Middle Ages — my Middle Ages, I guess, when I used to go to the movies all the time.

[Ken]

Sue wrote: "I remember seeing it in the theater too, Ken. It does seem like it was in the Middle Ages — my Middle Ages, I guess, when I used to go to the movies all the time."

Ha-ha. Even before Covid I avoided movie theaters. Except maybe the occasional matinee on a sunny day. You know, when the theater crowd is less than ten.

[Sue]

I used to go to what were then called art cinemas some of the time though Dead Poets Society would have been at a big place.

[Nilanjana]

Thanks Ken. I’m curious—-didn’t you like Dead Poets Soceity?

[Ken]

Yes, I liked Dead Poets. Except for the ending. I'd have preferred more poets and less dead.

[Nilanjana]

I agree with you on that. I found the ending very tragic as was Neil’s death.

[Tom]

Hey all! My name's Tom, I'm an avid reader from England who's been looking into finding a good book club for a while now, and since I had heard from my friend Matthew that you were planning on reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, I thought that this would be the perfect time to join!

[Matthew Ted]

Welcome, friend. Nice to see you here. It's a great bunch.

[Jan]

Hello, Tom,

Greetings from Kansas City, MO -- home of jazz, barbecue, good friends, and (drum roll) amazing libraries soon to reopen on June 1st. I hope you enjoy this group as I do; I regularly look forward to the discussions and learn tremendously from the others here.

Enjoy a lovely day. It's raining here, so if you go on Google Earth, you may find a lone figure wandering a few Midwestern neighborhoods in a yellow raincoat. Yep, that will be me. (smile)

I look forward to reading your insights about this book.
Jan

[Kathleen]

Hi Tom, and welcome! Looking forward to your thoughts on the Calvino. I think I'll be needing help with this one. :-)

[Sara]

Howdy, Tom. Nice to meet you. Just in time for the Calvino!

[Ken]

Great to see you here, Tom. We are all the "travelers" in Calvino's title, I think. That's part of the writer-reader agreement Italo signed way back when.

[Carol]

Saddle up Tom, the ride is all part of the journey, especially with this group.

[Lois]

Hi everybody! My name is Lois and I'm from Dorset in England (Hardy country itself, though I'm still yet to read a Hardy novel. I remember my A Level English teacher frowning at me at the end of class one day when I confessed just that, and asking, 'How can you be from Dorset and not have read a Hardy?' I plan to remedy that this year, finally.) Anyway, I'm really excited to join you all in reading Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. I read The Path to the Spiders' Nests last year and thought it was wonderfully atmospheric.

[Carol]

Hi Lois. Glad you will be joining us.

[Ken]

Welcome, Lois!

[Sara]

You will be glad when you introduce yourself to Hardy, Lois. Takes longer to get to some neighbors than others. Welcome aboard.

[Bionic Jean]

Hi and welcome to Paul, Nilanjana, Tom and Lois! I look forward to chatting about obscurities with you all here.

Dorset, Lois? My favourite part of the country ... I should be there right now, and hope to be soon once my new dog realises that a car is not some sort of horrendous trap.

[Lois]

Thanks to all! I love chatting books so I'm looking forward to starting Calvino soon. I hope you manage to make it down this way soon Jean, especially with the summer on the way and everything opening up again.

[Bionic Jean]

I know! I'm going crazy missing all the cygnets hatching in Abbotsbury :(