Classics

[close] We are a group of African-American women motivated by our creativity and intellectual curiosity. We, currently, all reside in West Michigan, but are from all over the country. This book club is was born out of our love for books and need to connect as Black women. The goal is to read one book each month and then meet up to discuss it over food and drink. However, this is a no-pressure book club. We all have demanding personal & professional lives as well as side-projects. So that is a very flexible benchmark. As you're reading the book feel free to post questions or points of interest, as this is a shared experience. (No spoilers please!)

[close] This global discussion group has been designed to encourage debates about important and underreported issues of our era. All you need is an enquiring mind and a desire to gain or share “underground knowledge”. This is also a place to discuss the controversial topics explored in The Underground Knowledge Series (non-fiction books) by James Morcan & Lance Morcan as well as the Underground Knowledge podcast show.

[close] "Words have the power to change us" Join our online book club for our monthly discussions and more! Feel free to follow us on our personal Goodreads accounts and on Instagram @booksrealwhenshared. Also we'd love for you to check out our blog booksrealwhenshared.wordpress.com. We always post a review of the book of the month alongside a playlist and a fancast made by us and also other fun and interesting stuff. If you're interested, go check it out! Book club's pick of the month: "Wicked Like a Wildfire" by Lana Popović

[close] Started somewhat as a reaction to the British cozy mystery of the Agatha Christie style (think Murder She Wrote), there came a demand for something more real, action where the stakes were higher, the participants (good and bad) sleazier, the police on the take, the ladies fatal for any would-be patsy. This American answer to Sherlock Holmes became the basis for the film noir revolution of the 1940s. Our big three in this genre are Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. There are excellent crime and mystery fiction groups here on GoodReads and I have no intention of reinventing that wheel. I just want to carve out a niche. The focus in this group is narrower, more historical. We examine not only the classics of hardboiled crime fiction, mostly from the first two thirds of the twentieth century, but also quest together for forgotten and under-appreciated writers of this genre. We will be dredging up bullet-riddled, fish-eaten corpses of pulp fiction that were placed in a canvas burlap bag, weighted down with mason bricks, and dumped in the Hudson decades ago. Besides enjoying the classics, we're going to examine some of the cold case authors that wrote for Black Mask, Spicy Mystery Stories, and an amazing plethora of other fine periodicals, as well as hopefully discover other sources I may be unaware of at the time of this writing.