Next week, the Famous Speeches Reading Club is going to be one and a half years old 🥂🔥Not bad for something that started as a spontaneous idea on the Finnish Independence Day in 2024. Also, it’s pretty exciting how the club has evolved during this time. 

We started by reading Martin Luther King, Jr’s speeches. We still do it, at least I do 😃, but we’re doing a bunch of other interpretative reading as well. 

Apart from speeches, we’ve read poems, song lyrics, movie speeches, even short stories. 

I suppose the latter one is a bit too much for people to endure in an interactive meeting, so I guess we won’t be doing a lot of short stories in the future. 

But it was cool to do that experiment, too. 

Because I can testify that Ursula Le Guin’s short story ”The ones who walk away from Omelas” was a nugget of gold for me. 

If ”The Animal Farm” is a masterful allegory of the Soviet Union, ”The ones who walk away from Omelas” is an equally masterful allegory of the United States, in less that ten pages.

We were five people at the meeting two weeks ago, and our next meeting is two weeks from now on Tuesday, as usual. Tomorrow will be an exception: instead of reading speeches, we opted for a workshop about stage fright 😳 

As always, we continue to meet online.

The purpose of this informal club is that by learning from the best speakers and writers, we can practice skills that are useful for a public speaker. 

Studying and practicing famous speeches is something public speakers have done at least since ancient Greece.

Another goal is just to enjoy beautiful texts that make us think, discuss, and hopefully make the world just a little little better a place 🌎

What’s your happy place?