welcome to the finding good book club.
The book club stands at the core of our finding good community. Through this book club, we aim to promote wider reading and reflection, and hope to inspire us all to engage in meaningful conversation, connect with each other, and start claiming responsibility over our own existences.
How it works
Each month, we will be recommending a novel or a collection of poetry for our community to read together. These reads will all revolve the natural world, philosophies of self, or human connection. Monthly reads will be released on this page periodically. You can also follow us and stay updated on Goodreads and Fable.
You can access the members’ forum and begin discussing with other members or sharing your thoughts here.
At the end of each month, we will be hosting an in-person meeting to discuss our thoughts. In certain instances, those who are unable to join in person may also be given the opportunity to join the meeting virtually, although this is not guaranteed. Throughout the year, we will also host in-person events and share relevant opportunities for nature walks, volunteering and more, activities that can stimulate the mind and provoke greater reflection. These can be found here.
2026: Connection
Our theme for 2026 is Connection, and this will be split into three subsections. The second third of the year (May to August) will focus on exploring our connections to the natural world. How can we greater appreciate the world around us? In what ways can nature be a recuperative force? What can the natural world tell us about ourselves, and how can it help us connect with each other?
(The following list is provisional and may be subject to change.)
For May, we will be reading Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. This collection of poems revolves around our relationship with the natural world, and also how we relate to, fit in with, and connect with each other and the wider tapestry of existence. Whitman’s poetry encapsulates a lot of what finding good, at its core, is about. Life is beautiful! You can really feel it.
I have listed a few specific poems from the collection below, for those who are maybe a bit unsure about dipping their toe into such a vast collection. Please at least read the first two poems, which I have starred: “Song of Myself” and “Song of the Open Road”. I’ve also named a few shorter ones that you can have a look at. Don’t be daunted! I know that poetry can be scary but I promise that this isn’t. The poems that I’ve chosen are all super accessible and a really pleasant read, and May is, I would argue, the best time to be reading them. Find a nice sunny spot on the grass and indulge in these poems, which will bring you into an even deeper appreciation of the gorgeous spring (summer?) budding around you.
Get your copy on Waterstones (UK), Eslite (HK) or Amazon (worldwide).
These poems can all be found online, so you don’t have to purchase anything this month unless you want to (although I would definitely still recommend getting a physical copy).
“Song of the Open Road”*
Read online: Song of the Open Road
Length: 224 lines (15 sections)
I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.All seems beautiful to me…
“Song of Myself”*
Read online: Song of Myself (1892 version)
Length: ~1,300 lines (52 sections)
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
“On the Beach at Night Alone”
Read online: On the Beach at Night Alone
Length: 14 lines
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets…
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
Read online: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Length: 132 lines
Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!
“As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”
Read online: As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life
Length: 71 lines
I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.
“This Compost”
Read online: This Compost
Length: 47 lines
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches…
“Song at Sunset”
Read online: Song at Sunset
Length: ~50 lines
Wonderful to depart!
Wonderful to be here!
The heart, to jet the all-alike and innocent blood!
To breathe the air, how delicious!
To speak—to walk—to seize something by the hand!
To prepare for sleep, for bed, to look on my rose-color’d flesh!
To be conscious of my body, so satisfied, so large!
Our read for June will be Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance. More details coming soon!
Our July read will be Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. More details to come!
Our August read will be Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees. More details to come!
The first third of the year (January to April) will focus on exploring our connections to each other. What do we owe each other? Why do humans have such an immense capacity and craving for connection? What is it that makes our relationships to each other so important and so special?
Our first read for January will be Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Originally written in Czech, the novel draws on Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, which hypothesises that each moment in life recurs infinitely throughout time, and has been praised globally for its meditations on human existence. If every action is destined to repeat eternally, each instance of our existence comes to carry an immense and crushing significance. Kundera asks whether this weight is to be abhorred–is the lightness of existence unbearable? Is it heaviness that gives life its meaning?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
The following summary is taken from the back cover of Faber & Faber’s 2000 edition:
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon: a man torn between his own love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals, while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by choices and events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight — and we feel “the unbearable lightness of being”.
Kundera’s iconic 1984 novel provoked and inspired an entire generation, encompassing passion and philosophy, body and soul, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy — in fact, all of human existence.
Get your copy on Waterstones (UK), Eslite (HK) or Amazon (worldwide).
Recommended edition: Faber & Faber (2000), translated by Michael Henry Heim (ISBN: 9780571135394)
Our February read will be Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Published in 2005, the novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Through a fictional genetic and biotechnological lens, Ishiguro invites us to consider the philosophical implications of such scientific development for humankind. Never Let Me Go centres around what the author deemed the “sadness of the human condition”, grappling with the fundamental question of what it means to be human, and what the purpose of our existences might be.
[…] I think of easy-going days drifting in and out of each other’s rooms, the languid way the afternoon would fold into evening then into night. I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea. I think about how I read them, lying on my front in the grass on warm afternoons, my hair—which I was growing long then—always falling across my vision. I think about the mornings waking up in my room at the top of the Black Barn to the voices of students outside in the field, arguing about poetry or philosophy; or the long winters, the breakfasts in steamed-up kitchens, meandering discussions around the table about Kafka or Picasso.
[…] somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and—no matter how much we despised ourselves for it—unable quite to let each other go.
The following synopsis is taken from the back cover of Faber & Faber’s 2010 edition:
In one of the most acclaimed novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England.
Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.
Get your copy on Waterstones (UK), Eslite (HK) or Amazon (worldwide).
Recommended edition: Faber & Faber (2010), ISBN: 9780571258093
Our March read will be So Late in the Day by Irish writer Claire Keegan. Claire Keegan is a Booker Prize Finalist and Sunday Times Bestselling Author. Known for the concision and succinctness of her writing, this short story — running at just over 60 pages — is not only a moving meditation on human relationships, but also a masterclass in skill, as Keegan once again demonstrates her dazzling ability to pierce right into the emotional core with her subtly crafted prose.
“A taste of cut grass blew in, and every now and then a warm breeze played with the ivy on the ledge. When a shadow crossed, he looked out: a gulp of swallows skirmishing, high up, in camaraderie. Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers; so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human conflicts and the knowledge of how everything must end.”
The following synopsis is taken from the webpage of Faber & Faber’s 2025 edition:
From the bestselling author, Claire Keegan, an exquisitely written story which finds an unsatisfied man on his bus journey home reflect on the love that got away.
After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he might have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude — and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.
From one of the world’s great writers, So Late in the Day asks if a lack of generosity might ruin what could be between men and women.
Get your copy on Waterstones (UK), Eslite (HK) or Amazon (worldwide).
Recommended edition: Faber & Faber (2025) (ISBN: 9780571398041)
For April, we will be reading White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Set across four consecutive evenings in St. Petersburg, the novella sits at just over 100 pages and follows the fleeting relationship between a young man and woman. Written early on in his career, this is what Dostoevsky himself called the “sentimental story from the diary of a dreamer”. He leads us gently into this fragile world, exploring the nature of human connection, how we interact with our own loneliness and the sorrows of unrequited love.
“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
The following synopsis is taken from the webpage of Penguin’s Little Black Classics 2016 edition:
An exquisitely crafted miniature from the titan of Russian literature, Dostoyevsky’s profound story of love and loss on the streets of St Petersburg retains all of its intensity and power in the twenty-first century.
“My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man’s life?“
A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia’s foremost writer.
Get your copy on Waterstones (UK), Eslite (HK) or Amazon (worldwide).
Recommended edition: Penguin Little Black Classics 2016 (ISBN: 9780241252086)
You can also read a different translation of this book for free on the Project Gutenberg website.