How troublesome are you going to be?

Wrapping up our discussion of Omar El Akkad’s call to action — and announcing our next Book Club pick!

Welcome back to The Ink Book Club. Join us for one final discussion of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, following Anand’s powerful conversation with the author. We’ll meet this week on Zoom, on Wednesday, June 25, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern (details below) to break it all down — and to talk about what's up next!

The Book Club is open to all supporting subscribers of The Ink, so join us now to take part!

Omar El Akkad sat down with us this past week and walked us through the stages of his growing disillusionment with how the West perceives and acts in the world, culminating with the war on Gaza and the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians. That, and the realization that, as an American, he is complicit in those acts, led him to write One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, his stirring breakup letter with the West.

That conversation brought 1,500 of you to sit around our live Book Club table, and prompted many to offer thanks to Omar for his courage, clarity, and compassion. So often in our current culture, we encounter people whose minds and hearts are closed to new perspectives, but within our Ink community, One Day has broken through. We may have had preconceived notions about the book’s themes and how we would experience them, but then we read it, and have been profoundly changed by it. And while we may be tempted to dismiss faraway problems, the book tackles issues that are equally relevant to what we’re facing here, now, in the U.S. In any case, participating in this dialogue together has been deeply moving.

For our last dedicated live meeting around One Day, please let us know how it has altered the way you see America, if at all. Do you, like Omar, feel “implicated, complicit, challenged,” and if so, how troublesome do you intend to be about it? Has the book changed how you will engage with the world going forward? Do you now take in the news any differently? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

---

Our July pick! The Uproar, by Karim Dimechkie

And finally, our third Book Club selection is The Uproar, by Karim Dimechkie. We’re changing the pace, so buckle up. First of all, it’s a novel — a heart-pounding and hugely timely tour de force that we think of as a socially-conscious beach read. The author describes it as a “stressful social thriller”; we find it somewhat reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities” in that the protagonist stumbles into a tricky situation that snowballs. There’s a tension to it that articulates the anxiety many of us feel. Discomfiting! And there’s a twist at the end that NO ONE will see coming. Also, did we mention a dog is a central character?

We’ve got 50 copies to give away to Book Club members, so if you want a chance at a free copy, subscribe and join us today! Details on how to enter our drawing follow below for our supporting subscribers.

---

---