Turkey Immersive - The Forty Rules of Love
Hi, everyone! For our next stop, we are heading over to Turkey🇹🇷!
🎟️ RSVP: Priority registration will be open 10 PM on Friday, May 9th until 9 PM on Sunday, May 11th. During this time, everyone who registers will be automatically placed on a pending list. Then, everyone who has registered by the priority registration deadline will be moved to “Going” based on seniority (aka most number of events attended in descending order). Any leftover spots will go to new members. Anyone who doesn’t get in initially, as well as anyone who registers after the priority registration deadline, will remain on the waitlist to be added if and when spots open up due to cancellations that are before the event registration deadline of one week prior to the event.
So as to ensure that spots go to committed members and also to be respectful of Sam’s and Juliet’s time in organizing these events, please update your RSVP before one week prior to the event. Any no shows or cancellations within one week of the event will be removed from the group, except if there is an extenuating circumstance and you inform Sam and Juliet as soon as you know that you need to cancel.
Please finish the book before the event. The discussion will be spoiler-heavy.
🌐 Featured Book: The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara. Ella is mesmerized by his tale of Shams's search for Rumi and the dervish's role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shams's lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she reads on, she realizes that Rumi's story mirrors her own and that Zahara—like Shams—has come to set her free.
In this lyrical, exuberant follow-up to her 2007 novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together incarnate the poet's timeless message of love.
📍 Location: Juliet’s apartment in downtown San Jose. Address and details will be emailed to attendees the week of the event.
🍽️ Food: We will DoorDash Turkish food from Garlic Mediterranean Grill. Drinks will be BYOB. Attendees will be emailed instructions for ordering one week prior to the event.
🌟 P.S. Don't forget to bring your appetite and a sense of wonder!