You may be cool, but are you Century Club cool?
It’s time to meet more of the coolest readers in SouthCoast.
Each year, I challenge SouthCoasters to read 100 books to make my BookLovers Century Club. Reading 25-49 books would qualify you for the Quarter-Century Club, and 50-99 books, the Half-Century Club.
We’ve met members of all tiers in recent weeks. If you missed your neighbors’ mention, or your own, follow me on Twitter and Facebook to catch up. (Print readers: both links are listed at the end of this column!)
I want to jump right in now to mention as many readers as possible…
Cherilyn Parsons Talks Women Lit, a Program of the Bay Area Book Festival
In this post, Cherilyn Parsons describes Women Lit (a program of the Bay Area Book Festival), how it was founded at the height of the #MeToo movement, what type of events it offers, and more!
Author:
Feb 6, 2021
Cherilyn Parsons is the founder and executive director of the Bay Area Book Festival (launched in 2015 in Berkeley, CA) and its year-round Women Lit series. Previously, she was influential in building the field of non-profit journalism, notably at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and also has worked as a fundraiser, travel writer and book reviewer. She has a Master’s in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California.
Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic review – inside the mind of a survivor Clare Clark
In 2018, Olivia Sudjic spent two months alone in Brussels. Her debut novel,
Sympathy, had been published to critical acclaim and she hoped to make progress with a second. Instead, she found herself in the grip of an agonising spiral of anxiety and self-doubt, unable to write, unable almost to think. She later wrote about the experience in a long-form essay,
Exposure, a scrupulous examination of the pressures of social media and the personal scrutiny to which she believes female writers are particularly subjected. In that essay Sudjic argues that her periodic episodes of anxiety, while agonising, are necessary to her writing: the writer’s duty, she contends, “is to seek out chaos, or the very thing of which she is most afraid”.