About the Society

The Chronicles & Curios Society Book Club was founded by Laverne K. Wightman on a simple conviction: reading is a professional discipline, and a book club should hold itself to the standard of one. What began as a dozen readers meeting around a single long table has become a collective of hundreds, with a monthly selection, a weekly chapter schedule, and an archive of discussions that stretches back years.

The name comes from the two halves of our shelf. The Chronicles are the works we return to — the histories, the long novels, the books that make a case about how people live. The Curios are the strange, small, unclassifiable titles that slip past most reading lists and turn out to be the ones members argue about hardest.

Every selection is read together on a shared clock. Each week has a fixed reading range and a set of discussion questions; each month closes with a plenary where the membership votes on what comes next. Authors join us in residency, and members publish reviews under their own names.

Membership is open. What we ask is straightforward: read the pages, cite the text, and disagree well.