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book club

9 November 2010

#313 Do something politically incorrect

Nerdiness is in the heart but a pair of these can help you get it.

Nerdiness is in the heart but a pair of these can help you get it.

I know I shouldn’t encourage things that are wrong or illegal but I have to tell this story. I was 22 and had just discovered a fantastic writer. Everything he wrote was golden. I was at home in my apartment reading. It was the only thing I did. When I had 50 pages left I made sure to get his next book. It was like an addiction. I didn’t like to be around people and if I did I made sure that they were people who had heard of my favorite author so that we could sit and talk about his books for hours. I dreamed my dreams in his novel landscape, I named my budgie after him and I recommended his books to everyone I knew.

Eventually I got my best friend to start reading him. He got hooked at once as well. We had a book club, me and him. We talked almost exclusively in quotes from the books. We discussed the characters, the endings and everything that had to do with the author. From his latest hairstyle to his sexual orientation. One day I read on the author's website that they would release a short story from his forthcoming collection. The problem was that the story would be published in a men's magazine. A filthy men's magazine. At that time I was manically politically correct. Buying a men's magazine was the worst thing I could do. So, with shame in my eyes, I went to the nearest store trembling. I took the magazine down from the shelf and bought a banana, too. I don’t know why I bought the banana or what function it had. Maybe I thought in my simplicity that it would neutralize the bare breasts on the cover. It did not.

I read the short story and then my best friend read the story. We cried out of happiness. It was magical. We decided to copy the story and spread it so that nobody else had to buy the men's magazine in shame. We "borrowed" the school's copier and produced hundreds of specimens that we put on trains, buses, waiting rooms and shops; schools, homes and other friends' places where people sat. I know I shouldn’t talk about it here. I know it’s wrong and probably illegal. But he is an amazing writer. I still think so.

Text: Navid Modiri

Required time: 
1 hour or less
Cost: 
Free.
Cons: 
There’s a little less time for watching television. You might miss a really important soap.
Pros: 
You get to share your nerdiness with other nerds. Shared nerdiness is double nerdiness and the world needs all the nerdiness it can get. Long live the nerd!
Taggar: short story, nerd, men's magazine, koperia, bookstore, book club, banana, 365 things you can do
30 June 2010

#181 Start a book club

When I was little, I had trouble sleeping. As soon as I closed my eyes I saw the gray walls and shelters, heard explosions and screaming and had to open my eyes again. My nightmares were full of beetles with armor and dragonflies with machine guns. Every night I woke up sweaty and scared and had to get up and knock on my parents' bedroom door. After a while I started reading comics to unwind. I was maybe five years old when I was up ‘till late turning the pages of Tintin comic books without really able to follow the action. After a while I learned to read some of the words and eventually I could read real books even before I started school. But it also had another effect. The books and stories enabled me to sleep. And instead of dreaming about war and misery, I dreamed of mad captains, vampires and colorful creatures that lived in small huts in the forest. A little more fun than nightmares. 

After a while I began to wonder who these people whose names were printed on backs of books were. I was curious to see what they looked like and to learn why they wrote books. Stephen King, Jules Verne, Anne Rice, and Franz Kafka. How do they sleep at night? Whose bedroom door did they knock on when they had nightmares? When I was a few years older, I decided that I would be one of them. I would become a writer. It was the best job I could imagine. To sit and write stories that served as escape capsules for children with nightmares. Small literary sleeping pills for people who had trouble sleeping because of nightmares. I could help them dare to close their eyes. I had writers, cartoonists and Tintin to thank for enabling me to sleep. Therefore, I would become a writer myself. 

Required time: 
Two hours every other week. It can be anything from 6 to 8 people, both more and less, but keep in mind that everyone should have time to say what they liked about the book. A book takes a couple of weeks to read and you don't have to read the whole thing. You can take turns choosing the book so that everyone is satisfied.
Cost: 
A paperback book every two weeks. About €10 a month. Or, you can borrow the book from a friend or the library.
Cons: 
You may be required to read a book that proves not to be to your liking. Not much to do about. But just because a book is discarded does not mean that the discussion goes bad. It may well be the other way around.
Pros: 
To read the books by yourself, and to read books together and then talk about them are completely different things. When you read a book and, somewhere in the back of your mind, know that you should think about theme, dialogue, character-building and other components, you read with more focus and will also be able to talk about it in depth and in a different way.
Taggar: book club