Chapter One Book Group
Chapter One is a community of friends committed to enriching our lives through shared experience of the written word and meaningful discussion. The group was established in January 2008 and is currently celebrating its eighteenth year.
Each month, Chapter One dives into a new book selected directly from group nominations. Selections can vary as much as our members.
The group continues to meet and celebrate literature each month in the Chillicothe area of Ohio.
December 2025
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Fiction
Published in 1960
Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was once a high-school basketball star, all grace and promise beneath the gym lights. Now, at twenty-six, he’s trapped in a suffocating marriage, a dead-end job and a quiet Pennsylvania town that seems bent on shrinking his world. When the weight of his choices becomes too much, Rabbit does what he knows best: he runs. But the wide-open freedom he craves quickly collides with the messy realities of adulthood, responsibility and the people who refuse to be outrun.
With startling intimacy and razor-sharp insight, John Updike traces the restless pulse of a man caught between youth and maturity, desire and duty, self-preservation and self-destruction. Rabbit, Run is at once tender and brutal, a portrait of American yearning in all its beauty and all its ruin. It’s the story of a man desperate to reclaim a life that may never have truly been his – and the heartbreak left in the wake of escape.
This meeting for discussion of Book #216 is currently scheduled for December 20 at 4 PM.
January 2026
Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog
Memoir
Published in 2022
Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All is a feverish, magnetic plunge into the mind of one of cinema’s great mad poets. In these pages, Herzog revisits the wild, hungry years of his youth: growing up in postwar Bavaria, finding his voice in the rubble and carving his way into filmmaking with a relentless, almost mythic determination. It’s a memoir that reads like an odyssey, each chapter charged with the surreal intensity and metaphysical wonder that have become Herzog’s signature.
But beneath the legendary bravado – the volcanic shoots, the hazardous expeditions, the impossible dreams – Herzog reveals a startling tenderness. He reflects on art as a sacred calling, on the beauty he chases across continents and on the many human spirits who shaped him along the way. The result is both a confession and a manifesto: a portrait of an artist who believes that cinema, like life itself, is a battlefield where the only way forward is with defiant, ecstatic courage.
This meeting for discussion of Book #217 is currently scheduled for January 10 at 5 PM.