bookish girl book club

Welcome, readers! The kick-off book for our virtual book club is Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Published in 1927, Death Comes for the Archbishop enjoys spots on both the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels and Time Magazine's 100 Best English Language Novels. Cather herself considered it her best work.

Death Comes for the Archbishop follows a Catholic bishop and priest as they struggle to establish a diocese throughout the New Mexican territory in the mid-19th century. Like much of Cather's work you can expect it to be a simple story full of beautiful descriptions. Because of the book's structure, Cather hesitated to call Death Comes for the Archbishop a novel. Rather it reads more like a collection of short stories about the two main characters, Bishop Latour and Father Valliant.

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The idea for an online book club started, really, with my bookish sister Kelly who loves books and who loves to discuss books but who lives too far away to participate in a bona fide book club, at least, that is, with me. This was a real bookish bummer. So one day we were thinking about all the other members of our family, and friends too, who live just too darn far... but who are nevertheless quite bookish. We wanted to discuss books with all these bookish folks, too!

And we were thinking that maybe there were other bookish people out there in the world who want to discuss books and who maybe don't want to leave the house so much to do so. And, so maybe, we thought, a book club could be a blog? We weren't sure... but we wanted to find out. And that, my bookish friends, was the genesis of the Bookish Girl Book Club.

The Bookish Girl Book Club is very new and somewhat experimental. We've come up with a loose framework for how we think things should, or may, go... but everything is subject to change (or hopefully, improvement).

Here's what you need to know so far:

1. First of all, join! Email us at bookishgirlbookclub@gmail.com to be added to the club. Of course, if you'd rather read along as more silent-observer and less active-participant, that's fine too! But we hope to facilitate discussions here and we'd love to hear your voice. (Figuratively speaking, that is.)

2. We will be discussing the book as we go. Each book will be broken down into smaller sections. Discussion points or questions will be posted every week. These questions will be posted by either me or Kelly... but we will be turning to other readers to take the reins on books in the (near) future. Especially if your book is chosen as a book club selection, which leads me to...

3. Make suggestions! We will be posting a schedule for the upcoming months. Is there something that you'd like to read and that you think other bookish girls would enjoy? Email us or leave a comment.

4. In addition to the discussion points we'll have along the way, we encourage readers to post questions at any time. If you join via email, you'll be made a blog contributor. Just pose your question or discussion point as a post. Other readers can chime in in the comments section of your post.

5. While bookish girls are slaves to their novels, they are never slaves to this club. You can come... or go. Cherry-pick the novels that interest you the most; we don't mind! That's why we intend to publish a schedule. (Very soon, we hope!) That way you can plan ahead and choose what works for you. Maybe it will be all of them? We would like that, too!

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This week's assignment is to track down a copy of Death Comes for the Archbishop and read the Prologue and Books One and Two. (This is only about 80 pages.) I'll post something next Wednesday.

Have fun and see you next week!

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