Book Social: A Reading Party

Book Social returns to the Bloch Lobby on Friday, November 20, from 6 PM to 8 PM. It's a reading party hosted by the Spencer Art Reference Library, which is up on the second floor of the Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. The format is simple: you bring a book, you read, and you hang out with other people doing the same thing.

If you've never spent time there, the Spencer is a free public resource with more than 290,000 art books and journals, along with online databases, rare special collection materials, and digitized resources. Its strengths are in Asian, African, Native American, European, photography, modern and contemporary, and regional art. It's the kind of place where you can get lost in the stacks for an afternoon, and Book Social is just one of the ways they open it up for people to use.

Since the party is hosted by the library, it's a good excuse to spend some time around those collections. You can bring whatever you're currently reading, or maybe something you've been meaning to get back to, and spend a couple of hours with it in the company of other readers. It's a low-pressure way to spend a Friday evening—no performance, no agenda, just reading and socializing.

It runs from 6 PM to 8 PM on Friday, November 20, in the Bloch Lobby, and it's free to attend.