Read Together. Step Outside. Pay Attention.
Spring doesn’t need another obligation. It needs an invitation.
This season, Arts Passport Book Club is doing what it does best: pairing books that linger with experiences that deepen them. Not lectures. Not homework. Just smart reads, thoughtful conversations, and places that make the ideas land in your body, not just your brain.
Two months. Two radically different books. One shared through-line: paying closer attention to the world we’re already standing in.
February: Florida, Re-Encountered
Florida
In partnership with Florida Botanical Gardens
Lauren Groff’s Florida doesn’t sell postcards. It offers something more honest: heat, beauty, unease, wonder, and the quiet threat that nature is always watching us back.
For February, we’re taking that energy outside.
We’ll gather at the Florida Botanical Gardens for a grounded, unhurried conversation—then walk the gardens together, letting Groff’s landscapes echo through palms, paths, and native growth. Reading becomes noticing. Noticing becomes community.
Book Club Gathering
📍 Florida Botanical Gardens
🗓 Saturday, February 21
🕚 11:00 AM — Book Discussion
🕛 12:00 PM — Guided Garden Stroll
📚 Get your copy from Tombolo Books
✨ Arts Passport Member Perk: Free copy of Florida + garden entry
This one’s for readers who want to slow down—and look harder at the place they call home.
March: Power, Rewritten
The Silence of the Girls
In partnership with The Studio@620
March shifts the lens.
Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls retells The Iliad not through heroes, but through the women forced to survive them. It’s sharp, unsettling, and impossible to read passively.
We’ll bring that conversation into the room with an all-female production of Julius Caesar at The Studio@620—placing questions of power, loyalty, and violence squarely in the present tense.
Book Club Gathering
📍 The Studio@620
🗓 Sunday, March 15
🕑 2:00 PM — Book Discussion
🕒 3:00 PM — Julius Caesar
📚 Get your copy from Tombolo Books
✨ Arts Passport Member Perk: Free copy of The Silence of the Girls + show ticket
This is for readers who like their classics cracked open—and argued with.
Why This. Why Now.
Because reading alone is fine.
Reading together, in places that sharpen the meaning, is better.
Come for the book. Stay for the conversation.
Leave with your mind expanded—and your sense of community a little stronger.
Join the Spring Arts Passport Book Club.
In partnership with Tombolo Books February Arts Passport Book Club: Florida In partnership with Florida Botanical Gardens In February, we’ll slow things down and step outside with Florida by Lauren Groff—a vivid, strange, and often unsettling collection that captures the beauty and brutality of the state we call
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