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Reminder: Our first Bibliophibians Book Club meeting for this decade is on Saturday, 25 January 2020. Book: Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. Time: 4-6pm. Venue: Tin-aw Art Gallery at Somerset Olympia, Makati Avenue beside the Manila Peninsula. It’s our last book club meeting at Tin-aw (sob), which closes temporarily at the end of the month.

If previous book club meetings are any indication, many of you will be cramming the book this week. Good luck, because as with Tokarczuk’s Flights, Drive Your Plow… requires focus, i.e. you can’t read it while watching The Witcher, even if both works are by Polish authors haha. But Drive Your Plow… has a more conventional structure than Flights, and it also has an engagingly bonkers narrator. If you love animals, you will find much to relate to.

Some information you might find useful:
1. It’s a murder-mystery where the detective is kind of like Miss Marple if she practised astrology.
2. The murders are grisly and involve animals. In fact the detective insists that animals perpetrated the crimes as a form of revenge.
3. The narrator is helping her former student translate William Blake, the 18th century English poet (and artist and printer and also magnificently bonkers) into Polish. Each chapter begins with lines from Blake’s Auguries of Innocence; as you go along you realize that Blake is the key to the mystery. (Blake and serial murderers: See Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, where Hannibal Lecter first made an appearance.)

Auguries of Innocence
by William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thr’ all its regions
A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State
A Horse misusd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear
A Skylark wounded in the wing
A Cherubim does cease to sing
(Continue reading at Poetry Foundation)

See you on Saturday. Everyone who’s read the assigned book is welcome.