A Bob Dylan Book Club

It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Reading)

If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, why not join A Bob Dylan Book Club? Our mission is to cultivate a welcoming space to discuss books about Bob Dylan’s cultural context and artistic expression in all mediums. We meet each month on Zoom. Even if you haven’t read the month’s book, don’t think twice, it’s alright. We encourage attendees to come and evaluate if they want to read the book, or just need an excuse to talk Dylan with the community.

We’ve read 14 books since August of 2023. The fourth book was my first, Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s “Time Out of Mind” by the great Graley Herren, who was in attendance! One of the special features of the group is that the author usually joins us for our discussion, availing themselves to answer all of our burning questions. Three months later, I had the honor to facilitate a conversation with Erin Callahan and Court Carney for The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me. Since then I’ve led a few more, most recently being joined by Laura Tenschert to discuss her brilliant contributions to Dylan at 80 and Erin and Court’s book. Since Laura’s podcast was what first got me into more than just listening to Bob’s music, it felt like a wonderful full circle moment.

Peter White is the heart and soul of the book club. Sensing my enthusiasm, he was gracious enough to ask me to join him as an advisor. Now with Roberta Rakove and Brian Walsh, we reach out to authors, try to come up with new ideas or improvements for our site, and ultimately come up with the schedule of books to read. The book I was most delighted to add to our list was The Philosophy of Modern Song, by the man himself. An invitation was extended for Bob to join us! I had some thoughts I wanted to share, but thought it would be fun to have members of our group each take a different chapter/song for discussion. Everyone who volunteered went above and beyond with their research, preparation, and presentation. We were all so thrilled with the outcome, we decided to continue the format with the same book the following month.

My favorite part of the advisory group is figuring out together what the schedule of books should be. Selfishly, I sometimes want to put forth a book I really want to read anyway. Then again, a book I’ve already enjoyed, I want others to read it too. The most important consideration though is balancing the types of books month to month, like building a setlist or track list for an LP. Some books will never go out of style, but we also want to be timely with new releases. We want a good mix of scholarly work, fandom, biography, etcetera. For example, two books I really enjoyed in back to back months were Professor Raphael Falco’s No One To Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan and Mary Lee Kortes’ Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob. This is my submission if there is a volume II of the latter. We are always looking for suggestions of books to include, and someone to lead the discussion, so if you have ideas we’d love to hear from you!

Has this been just a long commercial for the book club, and a way to recognize kind and intelligent people? Yes, but that’s what makes the Dylan community great.

P.S. - I included an inordinate amount of links to my former blog posts. Instead of shameless self promotion, think of it as a way to catch up or revisit 2024, a year in review.