Required Reading Revisited: The Turn of the Screw

BookPeople hosts a discussion of The Turn of the Screw on Sunday, October 11, at 4 PM. It's part of Required Reading Revisited, a reading series that takes a broad view of the classics: everything from the ancient canon to modern classics, required reading within a genre, literature in translation, and cultural required reading.

This particular session focuses on The Turn of the Screw, the ghost story by Henry James. If you've read it, you know the book is a bit of a puzzle—it's a tale told by a governess who takes charge of two children at a remote estate, and as the story unfolds, the line between what's actually happening and what's in her head starts to blur. It's the kind of book that usually sparks a lot of debate about what's real and what isn't, which is exactly why it works as a group discussion. You don't need to be a scholar to join in; you just need to have read the story and be ready to talk through it with other people who have.

That's the core of what the series does: it puts a single book on the table and lets a group work through it together. Because it's part of a larger series, this isn't a one-off; it's one of several titles the group will tackle over time, each one chosen from that wide-ranging definition of the classics. Whether you're returning to a book you first encountered in a classroom or picking up a classic for the first time, the format is the same: read the book, show up, and talk about it.

The meeting is at BookPeople in Austin on Sunday, October 11, starting at 4 PM. Admission is free.