Men of Letters is a book club. We choose a theme for the year starting in the fall, and read a book every other month until the summer. Below is our 2024–2025 theme, books, and schedule. Contact us for more info.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY

September 20

Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories

November 22

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

January 24

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, selections:

“Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law”
“To Measure the True and False by Our Own Capacity”
“Of Cannibals”
“Of Smells”
“Of Prayers”
“Of Practice”
“Of a Monstrous Child”
“Of Experience”

“Dear Men of Letters: I can’t read French! Is there a translation you recommend?” Glad you asked! The translation of Donald Frame is said to be the best. It is available in the edition of his complete essays published by Stanford University Press and in Montaigne’s one-volume complete works published by Everyman's Library. But no particular translation is required. Warren Farha will gladly order (or possibly already stocks) whatever version you want at Eighth Day Books. You can also read a very old seventeenth-century translation online.

March 7

Beowulf

Hwæt! If you, like us, cannot read Old English, then you, like us, should learn. Time is short, however; so in the meantime, as you brush up on your Anglo-Saxon, we recommend reading Beowulf in translation. Seamus Heaney’s is pretty much the standard and can be procured at Eighth Day Books. (The translation is available via audiobook as well—narrated by Heaney himself on Audible and someone else on Spotify.) But no particular translation is required.

Recommended (but by no means required) background reading: J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” was a watershed in (re)habilitating Beowulf’s place in the literary canon and beautifully expostulates on the poem’s reception, rhetoric, composition, and even textual history. Read it beforehand and you will be the ringer in our discussion! It is collected in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, which sadly appears to be out of print but can be got for a reasonable price online.

May

Homer, The Odyssey

Check back for details.