Culture

1book140 January Discussion Schedule: 'Just Kids'

By J. Nathan Matias
1book140_icon.JPG Join our our Twitter book club this January to discuss Just Kids, a memoir by singer-songwriter Patti Smith. "Just Kids captures a moment when Ms. Smith and Mapplethorpe were young, inseparable, perfectly bohemian and completely unknown," Janet Maslin writes in the New York Times review. Smith's book won the National Book Award in 2010.

Smith recently announced a new trilogy of nonfiction books, including another memoir. Her latest album Banga is a trip through "the network of my mind and the correspondences of things," a network that is beautifully presented in this month's book.

It's easy to join our Twitter book club. Find a copy of Just Kids, follow us at @1book140, start reading, and add your voice. What do we discuss? Read a summary of the first week of December 2012 on #1book140.

Here's our discussion schedule. Just Kids has one large middle chapter surrounded by much smaller ones, so the schedule is more complicated than usual:

  • Week One: Chapter one, "Monday's Children" using #1b140_1 as a hashtag for your tweets
  • Week Two: Chapter two, "Just Kids," and into the first part of "Hotel Chelsea" #1b140_2
    • Read until the section that opens with "Robert's great wish was to break into the world that surrounded Andy Warhol"
  • Week Three: Finish chapter three, "Hotel Chelsea" #1b140_3
  • Week Four: "Separate Ways Together" and "Holding Hands with God" #1b140_4