Welcome, welcome! Hopefully you’re a return member, but if not, welcome to The Bookly Club  🙂 We hope you’ll read with us! Each month (or two) we select a book to read together based on a seasonal theme. Since we can’t all be in the same place, luckily we have the internet so we can all talk books, anytime, from wherever we are.

In July our theme is The Patriot. With 4th of July right around the corner, we like to take this month to read something about Americana. And we don’t shy away from ugly truths. It’s important to push the boundaries of how we see our country, our patriotism, who we are, and who we should be as Americans. Who we are and who we should be is different for everyone. So we like to read as much as we can of what different people think that means.

That’s why we’ve selected Rebecca Solnit’s most recent essay collection Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays). If you don’t know of Rebecca Solnit yet, we’re very happy to be the ones to introduce you to her. She’s a writer, feminist, historian, and activist who’s published over twenty books on a variety of subjects. Since starting her career as an independent writer in the late 80’s she’s received much acclaim and praise. She’s a regular contributor to numerous publications, including The Guardian and Harper’s Magazine where she authors the Easy Chair column. Not to mention her most recent books which have reached unforeseen popularity, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark. The most recent being Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays) which was just published in September of last year.

“In this powerful and wide-ranging collection, Solnit turns her attention to battles over meaning, place, language, and belonging at the heart of the defining crises of our time. She explores the way emotions shape political life, electoral politics, police shootings and gentrification, the life of an extraordinary man on death row, the pipeline protest at Standing Rock, and the existential threat posed by climate change.”

With essays like “The Loneliness of Donald Trump,” “Naive Cynicism,” “Climate Change is Violence,” and “Hope in Grief” we expect this collection to be a fraught and challenging, but informative. We hope you’ll read along with us this month, and learn a little bit more about the current America. If you do want to join it’s pretty simple… read this selection sometime in July, stay in touch via social media using #booklymark, and come chat with us about the book anytime either in the comments here on the blog or on Instagram!

Talk soon,

Bookly