Announcing the Mystery Grove Book Club (MGBC)'s first book, Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel

Culture club

Beloved readers,

One of my top priorities for this Substack recently has been increasing the amount and quality of content being released for paid subscribers. I genuinely only care about paid subscribers. If you are reading this and you are a free subscriber to this Substack, however you managed to come across it or enthusiastic you might be about me or my work otherwise, I genuinely wish you the worst. Go fuck yourself.

America is rapidly transforming into a post-literate society thanks to short form video. In order to help address this problem, the paid subscribers and I will be embarking on a shared journey through some of the most important books in the modern literary canon.

We’re all going to read the same thing at the same time. I’m going to break up books into bite-sized chunks that we’ll discuss at regular intervals. I think establishing foundational texts is very important: Not only are great books rewarding in isolation, when read together they provide a kind of shared “language” to help understand complex ideas and current events and each other through. We can get a lot more out of these books together.

Paid subscribers (and paid subscribers only, free subscribers are not welcome) will be provided with discussion prompts and encouraged to offer their own answers and ask their own questions, to be addressed by me in a bi-weekly “book club meeting” where I’ll also provide my own thoughts on the assigned reading, any relevant background information, and generally whatever else might seem be interesting.

Our first MGBC title will be Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel, which is obviously a very special book to me. Wrangel’s insights into the tragedy of the Russian Revolution and Civil War are still very relevant today. There are lots of nuances to the book that I rarely see mentioned in discussions of it that I can’t wait to talk with you about and to hear your own thoughts on.

Wrangel’s memoirs have come a long way since the crude print-on-demand version I helped put together many years ago. Passage Press has released a handsome new edition of Always with Honor that features new and overhauled maps, numerous corrections of typos (painful for me, I’m sorry) or translation quirks from the 1st edition, and two new appendices with previously uncollected material that adds enormously to the book. I think this is the best way to read Always with Honor and recommend you buy a copy from them. However, if you need to save a few bucks to afford a few more months of my podcast, the book is also readily available on the secondary market.

Below you’ll find the assigned reading, discussion prompts, and guidelines for the MGBC more generally, but only if you’re a paid subscriber. Free subscribers, you don’t deserve anything except our collective contempt. Really easy to upgrade to a paid subscription, pal. I guess maybe you’re just too stupid and/or broke to do so. No big deal, you’d probably only screw things up if you were allowed in.