Book Club

After her son Hamnet dies, aged eleven, Agnes Shakespeare is struck with intense grief. As she mourns with her husband William, the pair struggle to come to terms with the frailty of life and the ruthlessness of the plague. Set in 16th-century England, Agnes, a healer by trade, must find a way to move on with her life and provide for her other children. Starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. Meet Dunphys pub at 19.00. Watch out for Cinema Club sign.

THE HOUSEMAID is a wildly entertaining thriller starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, based on the best-selling book. From director Paul Feig, the film plunges audiences into a twisted world where perfection is an illusion, and nothing is as it seems. Trying to escape her past, Millie (Sweeney) accepts a job as a live-in housemaid for the wealthy Nina (Seyfried) and Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar). But what begins as a dream job quickly unravels into something far more dangerous — a sexy, seductive game of secrets, scandal, and power. Behind the Winchesters’ closed doors lies a world of shocking twists that will leave you guessing until the very end. Meet Dunphys at 19.00. Watch out for Cinema Club sign.

[SOLD OUT] Hello! 🙂 Meeting place: at the Goethe Institute. I'll post a more precise comment on the day. Meeting time: 615pm. Please book online as this is a free event and likely to sell out. https://firstfortnight.ie/festival/beckettian-spaces-resilience Note / Disclaimer: Attending this event and every event in this group is entirely in every way at your own risk. Any questions, message me. Please please don't forget to join us! Thanks! Alan Beckettian Spaces of Resilience: Language, Creativity and the Mind. In partnership with the Goethe-Institut, The French Embassy, The Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin and the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies. This Franco-German event explores Samuel Beckett’s art of resilience across two contemporary artistic projects: a screening of En Attendant Monsieur Godot (France, dir. Alice Clabaut, subtitled in English) and a visual presentation inspired by the exhibition Samuel Beckett: The German Room currently at the Regensburg University. Through film, photographs, and conversation with artists, the event reflects on Beckett’s exploration of resilience and creativity, as well as on the ways in which Beckett's work keeps inspiring communities to find means of expression and grow solidarity and resilience. The artistic panel will include the director of the film Alice Clabaut and Céline Thobois, Teaching Fellow in Drama at Trinity College.

Join us to **practise and improve your target language with native speakers on Thursday downstairs in River Bar** (Burgh Quay, Dublin 2) from **6.30pm to 8.30pm**. **Our system:** **• You sit opposite a native speaker of the language you're learning** **• You speak 5mins English, 5mins other language, then change table** This ensures everyone gets an equal opportunity to practise the language they're learning. Our team seats people, controls the time, organises the table changes etc. What to expect: • Relaxed easy going atmosphere • Professional and quality service • Great networking opportunities • All levels welcome from absolute beginner to fully fluent • A big mix of ages with attendees at each event from 18 to 70+ years old • Topic cards on the tables to help start conversations Wide range of languages: We usually have **native speakers of English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese** and more depending on who shows up. **Admission fee €7** (€6 for student card holders). **No pre-registration required, just show up**. Loyalty card system: Come to 5 events and the 6th is free. Over 150,000 people have attended our language exchange events since 2012 to practise and improve their target language - you can too! Everyone is welcome! For more news and info check: Website: [www.languageexchangeireland.com](http://www.languageexchangeireland.com/) FB: [www.facebook.com/languageexchangeireland](http://www.facebook.com/languageexchangeireland) Instagram: [www.instagram.com/languageexchangeireland](http://www.instagram.com/languageexchangeireland) NOTE: The MeetUp attendance does not reflect actual attendance. There are usually around 100 people at each event.

Let's improve our self-awareness, by getting into the habit of writing our thoughts and emotions. & Let's enhance our curiosity and compassion in others, by giving others and ourselves an insight into the unknown lives of strangers. Join us for our 1.5 hours writing event. We will have some exercises prepared that give us the opportunity to write and share about our thoughts/emotions/experiences and use a variety of prompts. HOMEWORK: Before the event we ask participants to reflect and write +/- 10 minutes about a time they lost someone or something they cared for. Participants can choose which parts of their writing they feel comfortable sharing. **FEE:** €5 to support the group. Please pay the organiser at the event. We accept cash/revolut/paypal. **NOTE 1:** No writing experience is required to attend this event. Only a curiosity in ourselves and others. **NOTE 2:** Please provide your own notebook/paper and pen.

**IMPORTANT:** To RSVP you will need to register on the **WeMeet app** [here](https://www.weroad.com/wemeet/events/dublin/dinner-new-friends-flavours-of-greece-e133f117-e870-4c0c-8b5c-690a8ad7ed28)[.](http://wemeet.weroad.com/event/ea5a83d1-940d-4ca9-8fb6-0e2fd02ef3ba) **An adventurous dinner where you discover new flavours and new people at the same table.** **How does it work?** **🗓️** RSVP to secure your spot 📍 Dinner location revealed via WeMeet app notifications **24 hours before** ✔️**Confirm your spot** 18 hours before so others know who to expect Let the others know where you are when the event starts through our check in process 💰 Expect to spend between £20–30 👤 Virtual host: Shape your evening however you want 📅**Meet the group** at your WeMeet table **What to expect:** **🍣 Discover new cuisine:** This time we’re exploring Greek food, a place we fell in love with at first bite! **🤝 Meet new people:** Relaxed, no-pressure social dining where spontaneous connections happen naturally. **✨ Memorable evening:** Share stories, laughs, and a great meal with fellow adventurers. Limited spots - book yours and get ready to share more than just a meal!

Join us to **practise and improve your Spanish/English with native speakers every Thursday @ River Bar** (Burgh Quay, Dublin 2) from **6.30pm to 8.30pm**. **Our system:** **• You sit opposite a native speaker of the language you're learning** **• You speak 5mins English, 5mins Spanish, then change table** This ensures everyone gets an equal opportunity to speak the language they're learning. Our team organises everything such as the timing, seating people, moving people etc. What to expect: • Relaxed easy going atmosphere • Professional and quality service • Great networking opportunities • All levels welcome from absolute beginner to fully fluent • A big mix of ages with people from 18 years to 70+ attending each event • Topic cards on the tables to help start conversations **Admission fee €7** (€1 off for student card holders). **No pre-registration required, just show up.** Loyalty card system: Come to 5 events and the 6th is free. Over 100,000 people have attended our language exchanges to practise and improve their target language - you can too! Everyone is welcome! For more news and info check: Website: [www.languageexchangeireland.com](http://www.languageexchangeireland.com/) FB: [www.facebook.com/languageexchangeireland](http://www.facebook.com/languageexchangeireland) Instagram: [www.instagram.com/languageexchangeireland](http://www.instagram.com/languageexchangeireland)

A 2 hour Dublin walking tour exploring the crimes of the past. Delve into art thefts, kidnaps, murder, robberies and so much more! ## Murder, mystery and madness! “Obedientia Civium, Urbis Felicitas” Have you ever wondered what the words under the Three Castles Burning mean? Dublin has a long and rich criminal culture that goes all the way back to the vikings who first gave the city its modern name. If you have a love of history and gallows’ humour, then this is the tour for you! On our two-hour walk we will explore crimes from Georgian to Modern Dublin, giving context for how criminality influenced the city’s history, and was itself shaped by that history in turn. From Tiger Kidnappings to Heart Heists, come and hear the tale of Dublin’s dark deeds… Our tour has over 100 excellent reviews online and is ranked in the top tours on Trip Advisor. **To get tickets : https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/dublin-true-crime-walking-tour-dry-january-tickets-1978290441966** **TOPICS** * Tiger Kidnappings * 2009 BoI Heist * Trinity College Murders * Graverobbers * Molly Malone and Dublin’s Red Light District * Punishments and Torture * Irish Crown Jewels Heist * Veronica Guerin * James David & the Chester Beatty * Heart of St. Laurence * Debtor’s Prisons **PRIVATE TOURS** We are also now doing private tours for groups, if you want to host your own tour get in touch with us. We can do tours for friend groups, work parties, educational tours or community tours.👬🧑‍🤝‍🧑 **WHAT ELSE DO WE DO?** We host art nights, pottery, walkings tours, workshops, rug tufting and lots of whacky events. Join us for Drink & Draw Ireland's art party or one of our many experiences.🎨 **SUPPORT LOCAL** After each tour we will send you a link to each artist featured and also bring you to a gallery where you can support artists by buying prints, paintings or commission them for work! ***FAQ?*** **What happens if I'm late?** We encourage anyone who is late to still join the tour, after you get a ticket you will get an email that will have instructions.📩 **What happens if it rains?** All tours proceed even if it's raining, please bring an umbrella or rain jacket just in case.☔ **Is this wheelchair accessible?** Unfortunately parts of the tour are not accessible everyone. **I can't attend? Can I get a refund?** We need 5 days notice to issue a refund so if you don't think you can attend please let us know as soon as possible. We are a small independent business and rely on small groups to make these tours possible. **Can I swap my ticket?** Again as a small business our guides rely on these tours to support their livelihood. We cannot swap tickets unless you give us 5 days notice. You can transfer your ticket to another person to attend in your place. **Should I Tip?** If you enjoy it you can tip your guide if you want! Our guides keep all tips from tours so it gives artists and creatives a chance to do something they love.

Hello Everyone! Let's read something before coming to the event. It can be a few pages from a book, an article, a poem, an advertisement, a joke, a recipe, a quote, social media content - anything you find interesting. We meet and chat about it, as a starting point of conversation. Please feel free to bring books :)

Enchiridion Join us for an engaging discussion of Enchiridion, the timeless Stoic handbook attributed to Epictetus. In this session, we’ll explore its practical teachings on resilience, virtue, and inner freedom, and reflect on how these ancient insights apply to modern life. Whether you’re new to Stoicism or revisiting its core ideas, this event offers a welcoming space for thoughtful conversation and personal reflection

Hi All, This weekend we'll attend Hamnet at Cineworld (apologies to anyone who saw my earlier post re: IFI Mystery Matinee, it was sold out!) 12:30 screening of Hamnet 11:30 before hand in Dunnes Cafe, top floor of Dunnes on Henry street (please note, NOT cafe sol on the ground floor). Books seats three rows from the back of the screen to sit together, otherwise wherever you like! See you then.

Join us for Book Club from 1-3 pm at The Spot in Rockville, MD, on January 18. We will be reading “Murder on the Orient Express” by Agatha Christie. All are welcome, even if you haven’t finished the book.

[Profs and Pints Northern Virginia](https://www.profsandpints.com/washingtondc) presents: **“The Life of Frankenstein,”** on the birth, evolution and impact of a tale of man-made monstrosity, with Bernard Welt, an emeritus professor of arts and humanities at George Washington University who frequently lectures on Frankenstein in literature, cinema, and culture. [Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at [https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nv-life-of-frankenstein](https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nv-life-of-frankenstein) .] Guillermo del Toro’s lush and lovingly produced film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel *Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus* is just the latest of many iterations of the story to capture the public’s imagination. People have watched Victor Frankenstein give life to his monster in numerous films, on television, and on stage, and even perform “Putting on the Ritz” with him thanks to the comic genius of Mel Brooks. Mary Shelley did not just tell a tale. She spawned the modern genre of speculative fiction and gave rise to a myth that would crop up in debates over nature versus nurture and other matters. Even today it stokes anxieties over the potential impacts of robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering, by evoking the image of a monster turning on its progenitor. Come gain a new appreciation of Mary Shelley’s creation with the help of Dr. Bernard Welt, who has studied the relationship between nightmares and the horror genre and is the author of *Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art.* Dr. Welt will start by telling a literary origin story almost as famous as Frankenstein itself, of how an 18-year-old Shelley started writing *Frankenstein* in 1816 while staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with two of her era’s leading poets, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, her lover. Housebound by foul weather, the three read Gothic tales of ghosts and monsters and challenged each other to produce something even more terrifying. Mary dreamed up a story of a man who defied death by creating a living being out of scraps of deceased men harvested from graveyards and anatomy labs. The resulting novel, *Frankenstein*, published anonymously in 1818, would by that century’s end become a touchstone in philosophical discourse on the nature of humanity and in political discussions of imperialism and populism. By the 21st century, Mary Shelley (as she became) had earned a more significant place in the literary canon than Byron and her husband Shelley. We will examine how this grisly tale became a landmark of modern thought and look at the part played by numerous film adaptations from the first years of cinema to the present day. (Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.) Image: From a Theodor von Holst engraving in an 1831 edition of *Frankenstein* published by Colburn and Bentley of London.

**BreadBreakers is a community where people of all different belief systems and backgrounds can create community - and what better way to do that than reading together?** Join us as we combine the kind, curious, and welcoming atmosphere of a BreadBreakers dinner with the thought-provoking, fun format of a book club. Here's what to expect: * We'll be reading *Of Mice and Men*, by John Steinbeck. * This will be a one-meeting club, so if you've ever wanted to do a book club but couldn't commit to multiple meetings, here's your opportunity! * Snacks :) * BreadBreakers ground rules apply - we'll lead with curiosity, converse with kindness, and strive to dig beneath the surface level. * We'll be gathering in Meeting Room 1 at the Reston Regional Library. * Participants will be responsible for obtaining their own copies of the book. [Here's the Amazon link, if helpful.](https://www.amazon.com/Mice-Men-John-Steinbeck/dp/0140177396) * Our BreadBreakers table hosts will come ready with questions and facilitation skills - you come ready to discuss! **I've never attended a BreadBreakers event before - what is BreadBreakers?** BreadBreakers is a community where neighbors from all different beliefs and backgrounds can **hear, be heard, and know one another.** Most frequently, we do this through the ancient practice of breaking bread around a common dining table. But we're more than just a discussion group - we're a movement to heal our world's broken discourse and forge togetherness in a time of isolation and loneliness. **Through the sacred act of just "being" together, we're working to rebuild the town square, one table (or book club) at a time.** BreadBreakers is a religiously inclusive by Restoration United Methodist Church in Reston, VA. All faiths, beliefs, and stripes are welcomed, and our leadership and community include people who attend Restoration and people who don't.

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation as we discuss ***Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World* by Naomi Klein** Here's the summary: What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self―a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo? Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror. Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times. **Let’s meet at Caboose Commons in Fairfax to enjoy some good discussion and meet new friends.**

Please join us as we discuss **CHILDREN OF TIME**, book 1 of *Children of Time* by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This novel won the Arthur C. Clarke award, and is of moderate length, at about 609 pages. Please keep your RSVP updated and accurate! Space is limited for this event. We are intentionally holding some RSVP slots for new members specifically, so if you’re new and the event is full, please get on the waitlist ASAP! You may bring your own food/drinks (no alcohol, please) or you may pick something up in Mosaic or at the farmers market before the meetup. We do ask that you pack your trash out with you. * **[KINDLE](https://a.co/d/a3Cy5hF)** * **[PAPERBACK](https://www.amazon.com/Children-Time-Adrian-Tchaikovsky/dp/0316452505/)** * **[AUDIBLE](https://www.audible.com/pd/Children-of-Time-Audiobook/B071Y9TTHC)** **BOOK DESCRIPTION:** ***Who will inherit this new Earth?*** The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age—a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth? *\*Since missing one of these meetups is taking a spot away from someone else who wants to go, we'll need to have a stricter attendance policy than normal. For book discussions, 3 no-shows in a rolling 3-month period will prohibit you from attending any other book discussion for 2 months after your last no-show. In order to avoid a no-show, please update your RSVP no later than 10pm two nights before a discussion. Thanks for your understanding and cooperation! If you need to drop off because of Covid symptoms or exposure or a positive test or any other illness, there will be no penalty to no-showing or dropping late.*