#readchabon, all along TELEGRAPH AVENUE

Photograph of author Michael Chabon at a book signing at WonderCon in 2006. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I receive galleys that aren't associated with a set review date, I have a bad habit of letting them languish well past their publication dates, no matter how excited I was to get them in hand in the first place. I was pretty darn excited about getting a galley of Michael Chabon's September 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue when he spoke at one of the BEA Book and Author Breakfasts last spring...but I was getting it without a set review obligation. Pub date came and went. 2013 came, and 2012 went. And I still hadn't opened that galley.

Telegraph's time has come, along with something better than a fixed review obligation--friends who will read and discuss the book at the same time! Kim was there when I got that galley, and since neither of us has managed to read it yet, she proposed a buddy read earlier this year. Lu is planning to join us, too. How about you? Want to read along?

Here's the publisher's description of the novel:

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland. 

When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life. 

Telegraph Avenue is an intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own.

And here's our reading schedule, with the dates for check-in posts and discussions (which will be posted here at The 3 R's Blog):

• April 15: Section I (through page 124)
• April 22: Sections I and III (through page 250)
• April 29: Section IV (through page 381)
• May 7: Section V (through page 465)

We'll also be talking about the novel on Twitter as the mood strikes, using the hashtag #readchabon. Read Telegraph Avenue with us, and join the conversation!