Sipped Ink vol 4 issue 0.5

2666 — Introduction

Hello, and welcome to Daily Pages Club’s summer 2017 read-along of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Thanks again for signing up, and whether you’re a returning reader or this is your first read-along, I’m happy to have you with us for the journey.

The purpose of this introductory email is twofold: firstly to take care of a few small pieces of housekeeping; and secondly to provide you with the schedule that we’ll be working to.

How this works

Reading a novel the size of 2666 can be daunting, which is the whole reason I started Daily Pages Club in 2014. I had failed on a couple of occassions to make it to the end of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, but reading with others, having a discussion around the book, and giving myself both permission to read at a relatively slow pace, and structure to help me keep reading, meant several of us completed the novel over a three month stretch. It’s important to me, first of all, that this is an enjoyable thing to do, and to that end there are only a very few notes I want to share with you up front:

1. Read at whatever pace you like. Nobody is going to judge you for being behind or ahead of schedule.

2. Be thoughtful to others. The only thing I’d ask is that no matter where you are in the book, please don’t openly discuss events beyond the page milestone for the day. People should feel like they can check the #dailypagesclub hashtag and read the newsletter as long as they’re up to date with their pages (or if they don’t give a hoot about spoilers, but that should be up to them).

3. Newsletters will come out on Sundays. Times may vary a little, but certainly by evening UTC+0 each Sunday you’ll have received an email newsletter from me that covers the pages up to the Saturday before. This means if, by some miracle, I get the newsletter out on Sunday morning you can safely read it before you read Sunday’s pages.

The schedule

This year we’re reading at a pace of 100 pages per week (or 14.29 pages per day, but you’ll have to work out how far down the 15th page to stop). On the schedule (which you can download in PDF form here) you’ll see that most days ask for 14 pages, and then Sunday is a 16-page day. All three editions of the novel that I’ve checked have the same pagination, but let me know if you have any problems and I’m sure we can work things out.

OK, that’s about it. I’ll see you back here next Sunday with the first newsletter proper, which will discuss the first 84 pages of the novel. I really hope you enjoy your week’s reading.