Barbara McConnell
Asilomar Weekend
March 14-16, 2025
One of the major events of the year for the Great Books Council of San Francisco is the spring weekend at the Asilomar Conference Center in Monterey, California, titled The Barbara McConnell Weekend at Asilomar in honor of a beloved Great Books leader. During the weekend there are discussions of poetry, a work of nonfiction, a work of theatre and a work of fiction. The beauty of the area is conducive to stimulating discussions and convivial parties.
We return to the beautiful Monterey Peninsula each spring to immerse ourselves in a weekend of provocative readings, engaging discussions and in-person camaraderie!
The Barbara McConnell Great Books Weekend at Asilomar will be from March 14 - 16, 2025.
This year we'll again discuss controversial yet timely works and poetry selections that span centuries of writing but explore enduring issues.
Once again, this year, we'll offer special pricing and discounts.
To register for the event, please click here:
Also, here's a flyer with information about the weekend:
We'll kick off the Asilomar weekend with an evening of intense and challenging poetry discussions featuring works by William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats and Châtillon Coque.
On Saturday morning, we’ll continue with our non-fiction discussion of Carl Jung’s provocative and serious essay The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man. While examining the crux of modern man having moved beyond the collective unconscious that once unified humanity with nature and cosmic rhythms, Jung explores how to achieve spiritual happiness in a world that embraces consciousness while largely ignoring the unconscious mind.
Before dinner, starting at 4:30 pm, we will be having a catered Meet & Greet where long-time bookies can welcome new attendees, and share experiences about their local groups, and best reads while enjoying local brews, bottlings, and a generous spread of snacks.
After dinner, we’ll continue with the weekend's fiction discussion. Phillip K. Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer is not as well-known as his Library of America selections, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It begins as an all-too-near-future parody that leads to questions of predetermination and the battle between forces of good and evil. This quixotic adventure and its implications validate PKD's acclaim as one of the most visionary writers of the twentieth century.
Wrapping up on Sunday morning, our play this year is Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Written in the late 1580s, with immense poetic skill and psychological insight that foreshadowed the later work of Shakespeare and the Jacobean playwrights, Marlowe retains much of the rich phantasmagoria of this epic myth's origins in creating one of the first true tragedies in English.
During Asilomar weekends in recent years we've discussed the plays A Doll’s House, Nathan the Wise, Lysistrata, W;t, The Possessed, and The Iceman Cometh; works of fiction Till We Have Faces, The God of Small Things, Letters From the Earth, Never Let Me Go, Miguel Street, and The Left Hand of Darkness; and nonfiction works by Virginia Woolf, Ayn Rand, Azar Nafisi; Machiavelli, C.P. Snow, and W.E.B. Du Bois; as well as selected poetry. To see a full list of what's been discussed during our 60+ years at Asilomar, please click this past discussion list.
