“We live in a rainbow of chaos.”
–Paul Cezanne

Who and what will cross our paths? Take a quick look – fiction & nonfiction alike, all in guaranteed technicolor (with CinemaScope too!):

• • We’ll travel to the court of the Ottoman Empire in 16th century Istanbul, where a riveting murder mystery unfolds in the elite circle of the Sultan’s royal miniaturist painters who are faced with the challenges of preserving tradition versus embracing innovation. Why is the color “red” — symbolic of passion and danger — relevant to this spellbinding whodunit?

• • Celie, an awkward young African American woman in the rural South, is abused by her brutal stepfather and betrayed by a controlling husband but finds joyful redemption as her life progresses. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it,” Celie’s glamorous mentor Shug Avery cautions her — words that Celie takes to heart.

• • Masterful wordsmith Ernest Hemingway takes us on safari during the 1930’s among the green hills of East Africa. The beauty of the African landscape and the rigors of big game hunting are mainstays of this adventurous tale, but the spirited conversations about writing and literature are among the book’s most famous passages.

• • A soul-wrenching examination of the Nazi regime’s vicious campaign against its gay population reveals that during the Holocaust legions of homosexual men were sent to the dreaded death camps, where they were forced to wear pink triangles on their prison uniforms — an insulting color choice reflecting the vile social conditions that fueled this shocking calamity.

• • Originally published as Local Color, nine early essays by Truman Capote, acclaimed enfant terrible of American letters, provide a vivid exploration of the captivating places he travelled and the eclectic band of people he met as a brilliantly talented young writer.

• • A daring white journalist, who darkens his skin to a deep brown using medication, exchanges his white male privilege to pose as an unemployed black man in the Deep South of the 1950’s, where he experiences first-hand the rampant racial prejudice of that time and place.

• • A searing collection of essays by incomparable stylist Joan Didion, entitled The White Album after the colloquially named multiplatinum smash recording by the Beatles, has become a literary benchmark for understanding the fluctuating social mores of America in the 1960’s and early 1970’s.

• • In a heartwarming tale of love and recovery, an intense young man with bipolar disorder bravely navigates his checkered journey after a stay in a neural health institution. In his distorted but endearing fashion he soldiers pluckily along, ever sure he’ll find those proverbial “silver linings” in the storm clouds of his life.

• • A Joan Didion encore in shades of blue … The legendary author gives us a penetrating memoir on parenthood, ageing, and grief after she loses her only child in 2005 to an early death at just 39. This account is even more poignant because Didion had lost her husband of 40 years, noted writer John Gregory Dunne, in 2003 and Didion herself died in December of 2021.

   
  So put on your boogie shoes — off we go, chasing rainbows! Rose-colored glasses not required!
  

The group will meet in the Bound at the Athenæum on the 1st Sunday afternoon of each month from September through May at 2:00 – 3:30pm (except for September, when we’ll meet on the 2nd Sunday).

The facilitator will provide a syllabus with a brief narrative commentary on our monthly selections and suggested YouTube videos to enhance your reading experience. You can expect lively discussions to take place in good company throughout the year.

Sun, September 8
My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk

Sun, October 6
The Color Purple, Alice Walker

Sun, November 3
Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway

Sun, December 1
Branded by the Pink Triangle, Ken Setterington

Sun, January 5
Local Color, Truman Capote

Sun, February 2
Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin

Sun, March 2
The White Album, Joan Didion

Sun, April 6
The Silver Linings Playbook, Matthew Quick

Sun, May 4
Blue Nights, Joan Didion

Kip Brott earned his BA and MA degrees in art history from UCLA. He has also taken courses in fashion history at RISD, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Parsons School of Design. He offers popular classes at the Lifelong Learning Collaborative here in Providence, and he lectures at Hamilton House occasionally.

At the Athenaeum, Kip has led a number of well-received reading groups in past years. To ensure that this year’s selections were thematically consistent, Kip has kept in mind the resounding words of style queen Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, as she once appraised a hopeful designer’s forthcoming collection and asked pointedly, “Where’s the color?” Indeed, this season a closetful of neutrals simply won’t do!