About us
For people who like really old books!
Novels, poetry, epic, theatre, history, philosophy - the only rule is it has to have been originally written before 1800.
We'll have meetings on the first and last week of each month. One meeting will be dedicated to shorter reads - The Epic of Gilgamesh, Shakespeare's sonnets, Epictetus' Enchiridion - while the other will be discussing a larger work over the course of several meetings - books might include Dante's Inferno, The Arabian Nights, Plutarch's Lives or Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Beyond initial meetings, we'll vote to decide what to read next!
Meetup only allows me to have ten people join a particular meeting, but the more the merrier - if you'd like to come to a meeting that's 'full', email me at jack.malone67@gmail.com.
Upcoming events
1
Monkey King - Wu Cheng'en (c. 16th century) trans. Julia Lovell
The Shakespeare Hotel, 200 Devonshire Street, Sydney, AUThe third in our Journey to the East reading series exploring texts from the Middle East, India, China and Japan.
Join the Really Old Books Whatsapp to see the full schedule - the Meetup site only allows me to advertise one event at a time: https://chat.whatsapp.com/IzXLwdM1Fa33dNe4suamLV
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In 16th century Europe, a grumpy German man was about to begin an incredibly long and tedious argument with the Pope. Henry VIII was living in domestic bliss. The Spanish and the Portuguese had inexplicably decided they owned half of the world. Everything's pretty hectic. In China, among other things, a novel was written: Journey to the West, which dared to ask 'what if a pig and a monkey were friends? And fought crime?'I don't think I could make this book sound crazier than it really is if I tried. Monkey King is a must-read for fantasy nerds, Jackie Chan fans and book lovers of any merit. We'll be reading a 300 page abridgement of the much longer Journey to the West, specifically Julia Lovell's translation. Earlier English abridgements exist such as the one by Arthur Waley, but I'd like us to stick to the same text so we can cover the same material, and perhaps discuss a little more what it means to 'modernise' something 500 years old.
This will be our most 'accessible' book yet (of course, I think all the books we do are accessible in a humanist sense). No prior knowledge is required and you don't even need to know where China is on the map. (East of India, hence the title.) Be ready for a rollicking, wacky kung fu adventure where you just might learn a little along the way.
3 attendees
Past events
7
