Introducing the InsideHook Book Club

Come one, come all, and read a book with us

August 24, 2020 1:26 pm
vesper flights book club
"Vesper Flights" by Helen Macdonald is the first selection from the InsideHook Book Club
Getty Images/EyeEm

We all strive to be healthy, wealthy and wise. We want to improve and advance. The point of InsideHook, at the most basic level, is to help you achieve those things.

Yet these days, as we’re all stuck waiting for some sort of saving grace to deliver us from the doldrums of 2020, it can feel increasingly difficult to find the motivation. We can’t enjoy a meal with friends at a restaurant, and that great fit you put on will probably go unnoticed by the world save for your dog and maybe a few people in a Zoom meeting. It’s tough. Believe us, we get it.

The good news is you can still become wiser. How? You trust what your grade school teachers told you, and you read.

That’s where The InsideHook Book Club comes in.

Eight times a year, we’ll announce a title we think is important enough that we’d ask you, our reader, to consider picking it up and reading it. That’s really it: you read the book, and if you’re so inclined, you take part in a monthlong exchange of ideas about the book. 

For September, we’re excited to work with our friends at Grove Press to bring you Vesper Flights, a new collection of essays from English writer and poet Helen Macdonald.

Maybe you read her memoir, H Is for Hawk, or you’re familiar with her contributions to New York Times Magazine. If not, let us introduce you to one of the most important modern chroniclers of the natural world. She makes ecological concerns feel intimate and personal, something we could all use more of as we fight to save our planet from environmental collapse In the middle of the most chaotic year in recent history.

If you want to participate, here’s what to do:

1. Sign up for our Book Club email list, where you’ll receive important updates and announcements on all things Club-related.

2. Preorder a copy of the book, preferably from Bookshop, the online marketplace that supports independent bookstores across the country.

3. Read the book when it arrives, which should be right around September 1, and follow along with Book Club emails, where we’ll publish essays, author interviews and further recommendations pertaining to the month’s title.

4. Hit us up on Twitter or Instagram and use the hashtag #InsideHookBookClub to let us know where you’re at. If you say something especially funny or insightful, who knows, we might even publish it.

With that, we’re happy to present Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights as our September, 2020 InsideHook Book Club pick. Happy reading.

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