Critical Reading Required Book Club

Welcome to our newest book club: Critical Reading Required! This is a mix of contemporary literary fiction and contemporary nonfiction and is a deeper dive into each book than our other book clubs.

Critical Reading is defined as: a way of reading that involves actively analyzing and interpreting a text in a more complex way that involves questioning the text and your own understanding of it, which is what we intend to do.

This year we are going to tuck into such subject matters as nature & climate change, literary canon reinterpretations, body positivity movement, transgender identities, cults and the language of fanaticism, influencers & internet culture, intersectional feminism, deconstruction, and more! 

2025 Critical Reading Required Book Club Schedule

 

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

Bonus points if you reread Huckleberry Finn as well!