Tombs and Tomes Book Club

Tombs & Tomes Book Club

Book Club Basics

Tombs and Tomes is Congressional Cemetery’s book club.

We meet every other month on the second Tuesday in our historic Chapel (hopefully in person but outside this month), and we discuss primarily non-fiction books.

Our book selections have no rhyme and reason; however, our choices tend to stray towards the macabre, as is natural for a cemetery book club. Our very first meeting was in September 2013 and we chose to read Stiff, by Mary Roach (pictured here with Doug Graves, Congressional Cemetery’s mascot and NOT a real skeleton!).

It’s free to join, and mostly free to attend. For each in-person meeting, we simply ask that you bring either a $5 donation or a bit of food or wine to share with the group. Extra points for brownies!

Interested in learning more?
Read our January 2014 blog post about Tombs and Tomes,
Request to join our Goodreads group.

Still interested?
Sign up using the button below. This will add you to our mailing list where you will receive details for the next meeting.

Sign up here!

Up Next

September 2021 Meeting

Our next meeting is September 14, at 6:30 pm,
Outside at Congressional Cemetery, weather permitting

[tentatively also available on Zoom, Join here]

Selection:
Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice
by Emily Midorikawa

From GoodReads.com:

Queen Victoria’s reign was one of breathtaking social change, yet roles for most women remained rigid and narrow. The “angel in the house” rarely expressed an opinion, and certainly not one that challenged the status quo.

But not so within the social sphere of the seance–a mysterious, lamplit world dominated by enterprising women whose apparent ability to move between the realms of the dead and the living rewarded them with otherwise unthinkable fame and power. Such talents allowed them to cross rigid boundaries of gender and class, and to summon unique political voices–voices capable of reaching some of the era’s most famous personalities, including even Victoria herself.

Out of the Shadows, which draws on original diaries, letters, and memoirs, tells the stories of six such visionary Victorians. The clairvoyance of Kate, Leah, and Maggie Fox, three sisters from upstate New York, inspired some of the era’s best-known female suffrage activists and set off an international séance craze. British performer Emma Hardinge Britten left behind a career on Broadway for the life of a “trance lecturer,” whose oration on the death of Abraham Lincoln was celebrated by tens of thousands. The meteoric rise of Victoria Woodhull, born into poverty in Ohio, took her from childhood medium to Wall Street broker to America’s first female presidential candidate. And Georgina Weldon, whose interest in spiritualism nearly saw her confined to an asylum, went on to become a favorite of the press and a successful campaigner against Britain’s archaic lunacy laws.

November 2021 Meeting

From GoodReads.com:

Everyone has questions about death. In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, best-selling author and mortician Caitlin Doughty answers the most intriguing questions she’s ever received about what happens to our bodies when we die. In a brisk, informative, and morbidly funny style, Doughty explores everything from ancient Egyptian death rituals and the science of skeletons to flesh-eating insects and the proper depth at which to bury your pet if you want Fluffy to become a mummy. Now featuring an interview with a clinical expert on discussing these issues with young people—the source of some of our most revealing questions about death—Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? confronts our common fear of dying with candid, honest, and hilarious facts about what awaits the body we leave behind.

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Tomes & Tombs Book Club

September 14 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

Tomes & Tombs Book Club

November 9 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

Past Reads

We warned you, our book club reads are eclectic!
Here are all of our past reads, and see below for our current pick. If you can’t join us at our meetings, read along with us!

Our Reading List

2013

September | Stiff by Mary Roach

November | The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

 

2014

January | Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

March | Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

May | The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

July | The Lost City of Z by David Grann

September | The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber

November | The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

 

2015

January | Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

March | Spook by Mary Roach

May | Tinseltown: Murder, Mystery, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann

July | Little Demon in the City of Light by Steven Levingston

September | Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman

November | Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home by Sheri Booker

 

2016

January | Working Stiff by Judy Melenik and TJ Mitchell

March | American Ghost by Hannah Nordhaus

May | Dead Presidents by Brady Carlson

July | The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio by Hubert Wolf

September | Necropolis: London and Its Dead by Catherine Arnold

November | In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides

 

 2017

January | Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

March | In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

May | The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel

July | Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

September | Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud by Elizabeth Greenwood

November | The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

 

2018

January | From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty

March | The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

by Lindsey Fitzharris

May | Bellevue by David Oshinsky

July | Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

September | The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

November | In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

 

2019

January | Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

March | Get Well Soon by Jennifer Wright

May | The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale

July | Death’s Acre by Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson

September | The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Story of the Donner Party by Daniel James Brown

November | I’ll be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

 

2020

January | The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

March | Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

May | The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

July | The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece by Roseanne Montillo

September | Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

November | The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia  by Emma Copley Eisenberg

 

2021

January | The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic by Darby Penney, Peter Stastny

March | Ghost Maps: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Stephen Johnson

May | Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, & Criminal in 19th-Century New York by Stacy Horn

July | Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom

September | Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice by Emily Midorikawa

November | Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And other Questions about Dead Bodies by Caitlin Doughty
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