Please join us for informal book club discussions hosted by Leslie Connito.
The intention and direction of the Remix is to share fresh ideas from new and admired writers. Like a salon, this platform could bring members work together for shows by sparking new ideas through open and shared discussion.
Books and Meeting Times
Every 3rd Tuesday, 3:30 – 4:30 PM (after Art for Peace)
March 18:
Playground, by Richard Powers
April 15:
Between Lives, An Artist and Her World –
by Dorothea Tanning
May 20:
Seven Days in the Art World – by Sarah Thornton
June 17:
33 Artists in 3 Acts – by Sarah Thornton
July 15:
The Mirror of Simple Souls, by Aline Kiner
August 19:
The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming –
by David Wallace-Wells
Playground, – by Richard Powers
…Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.
Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.
Between Lives, An Artist and Her World – by Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning, one of the twentieth-century’s most original and provocative painters, delivers a vivid account of a fascinating life lived as an artist among artists. Tanning reveals not only her life story, but the irresistibly creative mind that propelled her to live it. From the small town of Galesburg, Illinois, to the art hubs of New York and Paris, Tanning traveled the world of Surrealism and went beyond it, with fellow explorers Virgil Thompson, George Balanchine, Alberto Giacometti, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote, Joan Miró, James Merrill, and Max Ernst, to whom she was married for over thirty years. Their life together forms an important and moving part of her unforgettable story; a story which, spanning almost a century, magically unfolds through Tanning’s incandescent prose.
Seven Days in the Art World – by Sarah Thornton
“An indelible portrait of a peculiar society.” ―Vogue
Sarah Thornton’s vivid ethnography―an international hit, now available in twenty translations―reveals the inner workings of the sophisticated subcultures that make up the contemporary art world. In a series of day-in-the-life narratives set in New York, Los Angeles, London, Basel, Venice, and Tokyo, Seven Days in the Art World explores the dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life.
33 Artists in 3 Acts – by Sarah Thornton
This compelling narrative goes behind the scenes with the world’s most important living artists to humanize and demystify contemporary art.
The best-selling author of Seven Days in the Art World now tells the story of the artists themselves―how they move through the world, command credibility, and create iconic works.
33 Artists in 3 Acts offers unprecedented access to a dazzling range of artists, from international superstars to unheralded art teachers. Sarah Thornton’s beautifully paced, fly-on-the-wall narratives include visits with Ai Weiwei before and after his imprisonment and Jeff Koons as he woos new customers in London, Frankfurt, and Abu Dhabi. Thornton meets Yayoi Kusama in her studio around the corner from the Tokyo asylum that she calls home. She snoops in Cindy Sherman’s closet, hears about Andrea Fraser’s psychotherapist, and spends quality time with Laurie Simmons, Carroll Dunham, and their daughters Lena and Grace.
Through these intimate scenes, 33 Artists in 3 Acts explores what it means to be a real artist in the real world. Divided into three cinematic “acts”―politics, kinship, and craft―it investigates artists’ psyches, personas, politics, and social networks. Witnessing their crises and triumphs, Thornton turns a wry, analytical eye on their different answers to the question “What is an artist?”
33 Artists in 3 Acts reveals the habits and attributes of successful artists, offering insight into the way these driven and inventive people play their game. In a time when more and more artists oversee the production of their work, rather than make it themselves, Thornton shows how an artist’s radical vision and personal confidence can create audiences for their work, and examines the elevated role that artists occupy as essential figures in our culture.) How to be both: a novel, by Ali Smith: January 28th, 2025.
The Mirror of Simple Souls – by Aline Kiner (meets July 15th)
A captivating story of love, jealousy and faith, set amid a community of independent women in medieval Paris — the perfect summer read for fans of historical fiction
This thrilling, sensual evocation of medieval Paris sold over 100,000 copies in France and offers a fascinating insight into the world of the beguines — communities of women who lived independently of men and successfully managed their own affairs all the way back in the Middle Ages.
A heretical text, a vengeful husband, a forbidden love..It’s 1310 and Paris is alive with talk of the trial of the Templars. Religious repression is on the rise, and the smoke of execution pyres blackens the sky above the city. But sheltered behind the walls of Paris’s great beguinage, a community of women are still free to work, study and live their lives away from the domination of men.
When a wild, red-haired child clothed in rags arrives at the beguinage gate one morning, with a sinister Franciscan monk on her tail, she sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter the peace of this little world-plunging it into grave danger…
This rich historical drama makes a great summer read for fans of Hamnet, The Lost Apothecary, The Wolf Den, and The Yellow Bird Sings.
The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming – by David Wallace-Wells
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.
An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.
The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.
NOTE: All Remix Autumn book descriptions were taken from Amazon.com, with no author claim attached to them and are partial excerpts spotted only for the Remix book club. Please go to amazon.com or other book websites for further descriptions and remarks.
Leslie Connito
Hosted by Leslie Connito
Leslie Connito is an artist, writer, and reader. She studied painting and art history at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Parsons in Paris at the American College, and Hunter College in NYC. She taught Art Appreciation in Hoboken, NJ, and has given many lectures about her art work and her children’s books. She also wrote and performed 13 Murder Mystery dinner parties. Leslie has many hobbies including horseback riding, beekeeping, poultry keeping, gardening, skiing, sailing, and at one point, dog showing.
2023 & 2024 Book Club Selections
The Cloisters, by Katy Hays, Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, The Invisible History of the Human Race, by Cristine Kenneally, The Gift, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, by Lewis Hyde, Visual Thinking, by Temple Grandin, The Patterning Instinct, by Jeremy Lent.
Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art ,by Mary Gabriel, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night by Jerry Saltz, Proust Was A Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer, How to be both: A novel Paperback by Ali Smith.