I run The Canon Club, a free Skool community. One classic a month, read together, with a reader's guide for every book that gives you the context up front and tells you exactly which edition to buy. That last part matters more than it sounds. Most people who quit a classic quit because of an edition or translation choice they never knew they were making. October's book is Frankenstein, and it's a perfect example. There are two different versions of that novel, both by Mary Shelley, both with the same title, and most editions don't tell you which one you're holding. We're reading the 1818. Starts October 1. Free, no lit degree required, and "this part confused me" is a perfectly good comment.

Most people don't quit the classics because they're too hard. They quit because they bought the free edition, which means an 1890s translation written to sound ancient and important. We read one a month together, and I tell you exactly which edition to get. Free to join 👇 🔗 https://www.skool.com/the-canon-club-9141/about

A few weeks ago I launched a paid-only community. A book club for the classics, $5 a month. After two weeks I had four members. Two of them were me and my husband. I'd done the things you're supposed to do. Emailed my list of 700+. Posted on my personal Facebook. Posted in a few communities here. Almost nothing. The problem wasn't the price. It was that nobody wants to pay to walk into an empty room, and a book club with four people in it is visibly an empty room. Every person who looked at my about page could see there was nobody to discuss anything with. So I made the feed free and moved the paid resources behind it. Free members can read along, post, argue, and never pay me anything. Premium at $5 gets the reader's guides. A few weeks later: 80 members, 11 paying. The part I'd tell anyone considering the same switch: What you put behind the wall matters more than where you put the wall. My paid tier isn't "more access" or "more community." It's a specific artifact that solves a specific problem, a guide that gives you the historical context and tells you which translation to buy, because buying a bad translation is the single most common reason people quit a classic. People don't pay for access. They pay for the thing that removes the obstacle. The free feed also does work I didn't expect. It's the proof. Someone lands on the page now and sees 75 people actually talking, which is the thing four members could never demonstrate no matter what I charged. Happy to answer anything about the setup if it's useful to someone. And if you've got a classic on your shelf you've been meaning to read for years, it's free to join. We're on Machiavelli's The Prince this month, Frankenstein in October. 🔗 https://www.skool.com/the-canon-club-9141/about

Meditations. The Prince. Frankenstein. The Art of War. Siddhartha. A Room of One's Own. Walden. The Odyssey. Be honest. How many of those have you actually finished? Not started. Not "I know roughly what it's about." Finished. For most people the number is one or two, and usually from school. Which is strange when you think about it, because nobody disagrees that these books are worth reading. We all agree. We just don't read them. The reason isn't that they're too hard. It's that reading a classic alone is a bad format. No deadline, nobody to talk to when you hit something strange, and usually a translation from the 1890s that reads like a legal document. So I started a book club that fixes all three. One classic a month, read together. Every book comes with a guide up front giving you the context and telling you which translation to actually buy. Discussion as you go. Nobody is allowed to be pretentious about it, and "this part confused me" is a completely normal thing to say in there. We're on The Prince right now. Frankenstein is next. Free to join, about 67 of us so far. So which ones have you finished? I'll go first: before I started this, my honest answer was Frankenstein and roughly half of The Odyssey.

Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a job application to the family that had just tortured and exiled him. It didn't work. He died with it unpublished. We're reading it together this month. Free to join JOIN THE CANON CLUB https://www.skool.com/the-canon-club-9141/about