down river road, the new Nairobi-based magazine exploring the alternative in literature, music, and visual art, has launched an online reading project. In “a reality that forces us to curtail how we gather,” the drr virtual book club, one of the magazine’s editors Frankline Sunday tells us, is its way of seeking “other ways of communing.” It takes its cue from A Public Space and invites the general public to a space “where we will continue to read together, to think together and share together beyond the restrictions around us.” The drr virtual book club began on 31 March with a reading of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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Reading Marquez together

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” 

We invite you to the drr virtual book club, where we will read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book whose title is, one knows, what this current period feels like, and has a plague of its own: the insomnia plague.

The discussions around each book we read together will be led by a different person, and the conversation around One Hundred Years of Solitude will be led by Carey Baraka.

Reach out to us about what book you’d want to read/lead next 

Here’s how the drr virtual book club will work:

Every three days we will read a chapter together. In the intermission between chapters, we will talk about the book on our social media channels, and we encourage you to join the conversation using the hashtag #drrbookclub. At the end of the three days, we’ll collate the social media conversations into a newsletter, and share these with you, along with our own thoughts on the book.

The reading for the first chapter starts on Sunday, the 31st of March.

Also, hey, if you’d want to jump in and read whatever part of the book makes you happy, do it, and let’s talk kule tu social media: #drrbookclub. We think now of what Marquez himself says about rereading, that, “The advantage of rereading is that you can open at any page and read the part that you really like.”

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The hashtag is #drrbookclub.