Le Book Club: Forty Rules of Love
JOI | LE BOOK CLUB honest, lively conversations that go well beyond the pages
Join our monthly book club! We gather around a book that's shaping how we think, about business, creativity, or life. They're honest, lively conversations that go well beyond the pages and into the real questions we're all sitting with. Selections are chosen by members and announced in advance so you have time to read, skim, or just show up for the conversation.
✦ THIS MONTH'S SELECTION
Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara. Ella is mesmerized by his tale of Shams's search for Rumi and the dervish's role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shams's lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she reads on, she realizes that Rumi's story mirrors her own and that Zahara—like Shams—has come to set her free.
In this lyrical, exuberant follow-up to her 2007 novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together incarnate the poet's timeless message of love.
✦ THE DETAILS
📍 Common Things, LES
✦ WHAT TO EXPECT
An honest, lively conversation that starts with the book and goes wherever it needs to go. Expect detours into the real questions we're all sitting with about creativity, autonomy, how we want to live.
✦ ABOUT JOI
joi hosts salons and cultural experiences for women across NYC. joi is invite-only and intentionally intimate.
Come as you are. Leave knowing someone you didn't before.