Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

It is the first day of Fall and I am so excited to start a new book with you this season. Now remember I pick books I think you might enjoy AND that I haven’t read. That means there is always risk involved on my part.

I meditate on the decision for weeks – sometimes months. I read reviews, articles, author bios, literary criticism, consider the afterlife of the text, check to see the raw reactions of Goodreads readers and the specific reactions of my friends, and more. A lot of thought goes into my decision. I do everything but read the text itself because I want to share that experience with our community here.

With all that said, we are reading outside of the box this time, and I’m asking you to trust me.

Our Fall Book Club pick is Invisible Cities by Italio Calvino.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo — Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

The beauty of our community is that you never need to read every book, but I urge you not to skip this one. My intuition says this read will challenge us in all of the best ways.

You’ll want to snag Invisible Cities from Amazon, the library, or your local bookstore as soon as possible and then we’ll get started with our weekly discussions. This time around, we’ll only read a chapter a week for nine weeks.

As you probably know, it’s a rare and precious gift to discuss good books with like minds. We are doing this in a whole new way in our online community. I invite you to sign up for our newsletter below. When you do, you will receive an invitation to join our Private Facebook Group. We’ll discuss one chapter a week of Invisible Cities for nine weeks, which is the best way to read and digest a complex work like this. See you there!