A local book club I belong to, the Omni Book Club, does not follow the usual top-down procedure of other book clubs, with a leader dictating what everyone else will read. Instead, every month we simply take turns discussing what we have read since last time.
Occasionally, we will challenge each other to read a particular title; last year some of us read Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. (I thought it was pretty good, but I also could not really see what all of the fuss was about). And then at our last meeting, some of us agreed to read or re-read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. (This year is the 100th anniversary of first publication).
I finished my re-read last night. As it has been decades since I last read it, I did not remember many of the details, and it was almost like reading a book that was new to me. I thought it was very vivid and gripping. I am also fascinated by the 1920s, so reading it played into that.
One of my favorite things that Congress has done in recent years was to finally stop extending copyrights for old books, and as a result, a lot of really fine novels of the 1920s have come into the public domain. I read the Standard Ebooks edition of The Great Gatsby; I still like paper books, but I also like being able to make the type size comfortable for my old eyes, and I can easily do that with a Kindle or a Kindle app or any other reading app for a smartphone.
Standard Ebooks currently offers four books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, five of Sinclair Lewis (my favorite author of that period, a writer RAW read in high school, according to Cosmic Trigger 2), three of Ernest Hemingway, and two of William Faulkner. Of course, more books will become available as copyrights continue to expire.
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