a book club ✳︎ a literary magazine

A book club and a magazine for those who read in English.

Name: Queen Mab
Author: Emily Mcbride

Every month we read a new book. “Not yet translated” is our favourite genre.

Become a member how it works ↓

Queen Mab — book of the month join any day of the month

We talk about books,

not “study English.”

We make materials that turn reading deeper and easier — especially if English isn't your first language.

— how we read

The book is split into parts — and then:

One

Flip through the interactive word sets and the margin notes.

word set · Queen Mab141 words

froufrou Tap to flip

Fussily pretty and over-decorated, often in a frilly, feminine way. He felt ridiculous drinking a beer in that ___ little tearoom with its lace cur…

flounder Tap to flip

To struggle clumsily and without progress, unsure what to do next. Three years after graduating he was still ___ing, moving between jobs he didn't…

ingenue Tap to flip

a young woman who has little experience and is very trusting, especially as played in films and plays My dear, you are carrying on like an ____________.

FlashcardsMultiple choice

Two

Reading gets easier — the key words and realia are familiar before you meet them.

reading notes✳︎

The Lady of Shalott

An 1832/1842 ballad by Alfred, Lord Tennyson about a cursed woman shut in a tower, weaving what she sees in a mirror until the si…

Lancelot

The greatest knight of King Arthur's Round Table, whose love affair with Queen Guinevere helps destroy Camelot; medieval French r…

Three

The book is finished within a month at a comfortable pace.

Reading Pace Guidenovember

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

9–14 parts2–3 days eachquiz ✳︎

— margin notes by bookflix

For every part of the book we collect the details and cultural realia that widen the reading horizon. We sketch and dig through libraries.

< have a look >

Mews

A small street or courtyard of former stables and coach houses, now converted into desirable homes, especially in London; the word comes from the royal hawk "mews" at Charing Cross, where the king's falcons were kept while moulting.

"Razor" by Vladimir Nabokov

A 1926 short story by the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov about an émigré barber in Berlin who recognises a former tormentor in his chair, playing on the menace of a blade at a stranger's throat.

Midlands

The central region of England, including cities like Birmingham and Nottingham; its accents are among the most mocked and least represented on British television, despite being spoken by millions.

Hydrangea

A genus of seventy-odd flowering plant species famous for their large globe-shaped flower heads. In some species the colour of the blooms shifts with the chemistry of the soil they grow in.

Mohorovičić discontinuity

The boundary between the Earth's crust and mantle, usually shortened to "the Moho"; it was identified in 1909 by the Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovičić from the way earthquake waves speed up, and no drill has ever reached it.

Oldsmobile

An American car brand founded in 1897 and discontinued in 2004, long associated with unglamorous, roomy family cars.

K-9 unit

A police division using trained dogs for tracking, searching and detection; the name is simply a phonetic spelling of "canine," and German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois are the most common breeds.

'The Tell-Tale Heart'

Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 story of a murderer betrayed by the imagined heartbeat of the man he hid beneath the floorboards; Poe wrote it for a Boston magazine and was paid about ten dollars.

Grandma Moses

Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961), American folk painter of cheerful rural scenes who took up painting seriously in her late seventies and became a national celebrity in her eighties.

Montgomery Clift

An American film star of the 1940s and '50s, admired as one of the first "Method" actors in Hollywood. A car crash midway through his career badly injured his face, and the long, painful decline that followed is sometimes called "the longest suicide in Hollywood history."

Mews

A small street or courtyard of former stables and coach houses, now converted into desirable homes, especially in London; the word comes from the royal hawk "mews" at Charing Cross, where the king's falcons were kept while moulting.