Book Club #13 Recap: Giovanni's Room

Thoughts, quotes and further inspo

Jul 30, 2025

We have a new highest-rated book club book! Last Saturday, we discussed James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and almost everyone rated the book between 4 and 5 stars, landing us at a group rating of 4.43, surpassing Martyr’s 4.27 stars.

It’s a short book that follows David’s affair with Giovanni in Paris in the 1950s, with all its ups and downs and ultimately inevitable ending. The story grips you immediately, with its beautiful prose, intense feelings, and nuanced explorations of internalized queerphobia, understandings of masculinity, and more – all things that heavily contributed to the high ratings.

Most of us are fascinated by how Baldwin describes everything from the claustrophobia of Giovanni’s room to the emotions, desire, and self-hatred that define David and his relationship with Giovanni. He explores David’s struggles with nuance, depth, and well-crafted sentences and still somehow feels relevant today.

This is also part of the reason why the misogyny stood out so starkly to some. It felt less nuanced, less explored, and weirdly out of place. For one person, this made it impossible to rate the book any higher than 3 stars.

We wondered about David’s reliability as a narrator (how reliable can a person be who constantly lies to himself telling a story?) and discussed the impact of knowing part of the end from the very beginning.

This inevitability is partly why I gave the book 4 very complicated stars. I loved the prose, I felt the feelings, but I missed a sense of hope, and rarely reach for books where queerness is so tied to despair.

(I, on the other hand, rather quickly decided on my 5 star rating, I really loved the book — Caroline)

Highlights from our discussion

Let me introduce the main character David with some quotes from our discussion:

David is toxic and annoying.
I don’t think David is capable of having a healthy relationship. Somehow he is always the problem.
Actually, I think David is very annoying.

Are you wondering if other characters are more likable or if there are any healthy relationships? Well…

Every character just goes downhill.
Are there any healthy relationships in this book? Conclusion: No.
At the beginning, Giovanni is smart and fun to be around but somehow at the end that’s all gone.

But I promise, most of us really liked the book and had many positive things to say:

With Baldwin's writing you could really feel all the desperation, self-loathing and difficult emotions. It hurts a lot but it's amazingly well written. He was able to unpack so many important themes in such a short book. – Caroline

Favorite quotes from the book

I already mentioned we loved the writing. Here are some examples of our favorite quotes:

⭐ I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.

⭐ What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?

⭐ Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before.

⭐ And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter any more; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.

⭐ With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.

⭐And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality.

⭐ One day I’ll weep for this. One of these days I’ll start to cry.

⭐ Take off your shoes. Take off your socks. Look at my books – I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.

Holistic Reading

📖 The reading group guide that inspired some of our book club questions
🎶 We created a shared Spotify playlist for Giovanni’s Room that became the soundtrack of our bookclub meeting.
📚 Actually, this is the perfect year to get into Baldwin. The new biography Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs, based on research, interviews and archival material will be released in the middle of August.
📺 There is a lot of media about Baldwin. If you want to know more about him, we suggest starting with the documentary I Am Not Your Negro. If you have other recommendations, we’d love to hear them.
🎬 Someone mentioned that the book reminded them of the movie Queer by Luca Guadagnino.

Have you read Giovanni’s Room? Share your thoughts in the comments - we would love to hear them! And if you’re still looking to read it, there are some copies left in the shop. We highly recommend you pick one up :)

Kanopi Literary Society

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