Bibliomancy Book Club
UPDATE: We’ve chosen the first four books and dates/times! (See below.)
Do you love books? I do.
In the year leading up to the COVID pandemic, I was part of a book club organized with—shocking, I know—other members of my CrossFit gym. (Our last book together in February 2020 was Station Eleven. Too timely.) Whatever valid concerns you might have about the intellectual curiosity of some gym aficionados, most of my gym friends were avid readers. Some of them just didn't know it yet.
I miss the fun conversations we would have while secretly just looking for a reason to get together outside of the gym. So I want to recreate that for those of us in the tarot (and tarot-adjacent) community who are into books and the magic they offer.
But I also want to create an opportunity for us to explore the power of divination through books, the art of bibliomancy. I rarely use it, but it's an important facet of my year-ahead readings, and I've come to realize that the enigmatic poetry of bibliomancy is the stuff of oracles.
So why a bibliomancy book club?
You can use any book for bibliomancy, but I find that I go to certain books time and again.
I've purchased, read, and then given away hundreds of books over the last decade or two as I've moved across the country multiple times, but there are some whose magic persists.
It's because of their richness of experience, their intensity of emotion, their importance to a canon of literature that inspires other works, and their innovation and creativity that some books hold a little extra bit of special something that exists beyond their pages. That makes them perfect for bibliomancy.
A book's power extends well beyond my own interpretation of them of course, but when they hold something magical for me personally, I can connect more deeply with their wisdom, even when it's ripped from its contexts.
As fictional texts, they transport me to other realities, yes, but I can glimpse other moments in reality through them—past and future. Some of them are my favorite books, and some are just books that I've discussed and pored over with others. Their pages contain the sweat and oil of my hands from multiple re-readings and the breath of me or of others who have held conversation over them. In these virtual days, I realize that just the shared experience will imbue them with their own magic.
Book Club + Bibliomancy Practice
The plan is not complicated. Once per month, those who want to will read a fiction book and then discuss it in-depth with others who have also read it. After that, we'll practice different bibliomancy techniques. If you don't want to read it or don't have time to read it, you just don't attend that month. There's no requirement to be all-in.
The Books
The focus will be fiction, but there will be a range of genres, time periods, and geographies. The Western canon of literature is powerful for its connection to the minds of many English speakers and for intertextual references, but it's limited, so there may be some "classics," but I want to also include writers who were excluded from that legacy, as well as contemporary books.
We could read the latest high-concept sci-fi, a hardboiled pulp informed by Great Depression traumas, a Romantic novel of manners, some queer magical realism, or the latest book club darling. It's all fair game.
If folks want to do a nonfiction or poetry book, I might offer that up for a change of pace since I also use those for bibliomancy, but I make no promises. I don’t enjoy those book club discussions as much.
The Details (kind of)
I anticipate that there will be alternating times—a weeknight one month and a weekend day (US time) the next—to allow for different schedules, preferences, and time zones.
We'll hold meetings over Zoom, and I'll create a Discord for pre- and post-meeting book discussion, bibliomancy resources, scheduling, and book ideas.
It will be free to join, but you should plan to buy a physical copy of the book so that you can use it for meaningful long-term bibliomancy if you find that it works well for you. (As with tarot decks, a cheap mass market edition works just as well as a fancy limited-edition objet d'art.)
UPDATE: The first four books and session dates/times have been scheduled. But you can still join in!
Saturday, July 30, 11AM: Project Hail Mary
Wednesday, August 24, 6PM: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Saturday, October 1, 11AM: Where the Crawdads Sing
Wednesday, October 26, 6PM: The Fifth Season