Is this group for me?

I highly recommend taking this course if you are looking for:

A dedicated moment away from the NYC hustle to do some deep reading
Guidance on how to approach a text and generate profound insights from it
An in-person community of thoughtful, friendly, readers

More details on the approach

Six weeks, six sessions, two novels. We will spend three weeks on each.

We start with Balzac's Père Goriot, the book that more or less invents the modern novel of ambition, and then read Substack star Naomi Kanakia's The Default World, published in 2024, which puts the same machinery inside a San Francisco tech house. Both novels are about someone poor and clever arriving at the edge of a glittering world, and what they do to get in.

Balzac gives us the pattern in its first and clearest form — the provincial arriviste, the corrupting mentor, the older person being bled dry by the young. Kanakia gives us a version where the currency has changed (healthcare, housing, the right vocabulary) but the tradeoffs have not.

The questions these novels raise are not settled ones. We'll follow them where they lead rather than arriving with answers. No background in French literature, nineteenth-century history, or the Bay Area required.

The novels

Père Goriot (1835)

Eugène de Rastignac is a law student from a poor provincial family struggling to rise in a Paris where, among the upper class, marriage is for money, and everyone has a lover. He lives in a cheap boarding house with, among others, a retiree who is ruining himself for two daughters who married into money and are now embarrassed by him. Rastignac can see two routes upward: charm a well-connected woman, or accept the help of a criminal.