Jessica Zafra's Book Club Is Back and Here's How You Can Join

(SPOT.ph) One of the most popular New Year's resolutions is to read more books; it's also arguably one of the hardest to keep. Let's face it, dropping everything to read is proving to be more challenging in this era of brain rot and doom scrolling. But the best way to stick to your resolutions is to find someone to keep you accountable—we're talking reading buddies, or better yet, a book club. And you might think that they're a dime a dozen these days, but what if we told you that you could join one led by one of the country's most prolific writers?

Good news, bookworms: The Jessica Zafra Book Club is back, and we've got the deets on how you can join.

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The Jessica Zafra Book Club, as the name suggests, is a literary group moderated by Palanca-winning author and columnist Jessica Zafra herself. And while she hardly needs an introduction, here’s one anyway. She’s best known for the Twisted series, a collection of essays and columns from her time at Today (Manila Standard Today), as well as for serving as editor-in-chief of Flip. Over the years, she’s also hosted podcasts and fronted several TV shows.

Beyond that, Zafra is herself a famously voracious reader—she’s mentioned in interviews that she reads at least one book a day—and a graduate of comparative literature at the University of the Philippines. In short, she knows her way around good writing, and then some.

For this annual project, the multi-hyphenate partnered with local bookstore Fully Booked to deepen the Filipino reader's love for the written word. Every other month from February to December, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., readers can spend an afternoon at Fully Booked BGC’s U-View with Zafra and fellow bookworms, diving into works of fiction that range from classics and speculative titles to contemporary literature.

The book club is open to all. Register online, select which dates you want to join, and show up. There's no need to purchase anything from the bookstore, although copies of all the reads will be available for sale onsite (and at other Fully Booked branches, too). Make sure you've read the material before going to the event. The book club will discuss the material at length and well, what's the point of going if you can't follow along, right?

Books will be discussed every other month, which means there's enough time to finish them as you read them leisurely—unless of course, you put it off 'til the last minute, which will force you to speed run the book.

Here's the reading schedule for the Jessica Zafra Book Club:

• February 7: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

• April 4: El Filibusterismo by Jose Rizal

• June 6: The Odyssey by Homer

• August 1: Short Stories by Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others, and Exhalation)

• October 3: Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

• December 5: TBD

You may use any edition (or translation) you can find. Again, just make sure you've read the books before you attend the sessions.

For more information, visit Fully Booked's Facebook page or Jessica Zafra's Instagram account.

Also read:
10 Must-Read Books By Filipino Authors
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