Book Club: Body of Word
About the Book Club
Body of Word is a quarterly book club hosted at Soma Haus — a gathering space for people to come together through books, conversation, and shared inquiry.
It's a space we've envisioned for some time: somewhere to read, to listen, to question, and to remember what it feels like to be moved by language. Each season, we choose one book together and gather to talk about it — not to perform our reading, but to sit with what the book has stirred in us.
This is a space for the curious, the half-finished readers, the lifelong re-readers, and everyone in between. No perspective is treated as too much or not enough.
Every Body of Word session runs on a pay-as-you-wish model.
70% of all contributions go to a beneficiary organisation thematically linked to the book we're reading that quarter.
30% supports Soma Haus’ Sliding Scale Program, which makes care accessible to those who need it most.
What Happens in each Session?
We will gather as a small group of 10 pax, including facilitators, at Soma Haus’ Joo Chiat location.
Each session opens with tea and time to settle. We begin with a short grounding — sometimes a breath, sometimes a brief somatic exercise — to help everyone arrive. The discussion is guided by a small set of questions shared in advance, so no one feels put on the spot. There may be an optional short writing or sharing exercise to close.
You don't need to have finished the book. Partial readers are warmly welcome — the questions are designed to work for both.
The session is suitable if you:
Enjoy reading, or want to come back to it
Are open to listening as much as speaking
Are curious about the questions a book can open, even if you don't have answers
Session 1 Details
Book Highlight:
When Breath Becomes Air
Date:
20 June 2026
Time:
3.00 - 4.30 pm
Location:
Soma Haus Joo Chiat Outlet
Price:
Pay-as-you-wish
70% to will go to HCA Hospice
30% will go towards Soma Haus’ Sliding Scale Program
About the Book
When Breath Becomes Air is a posthumous memoir by Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon of Tamil Indian heritage diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at 36. Rather than a story of decline, it is a meditation on what makes a life meaningful, weaving together medicine, literature, and mortality with remarkable grace.
We've chosen this book to open Body of Word because the questions it asks are exactly the ones this space is built to hold. What makes a life worth living? What do we owe ourselves and each other in the time we have? Kalanithi's South Asian heritage and immigrant family story also offer a thread of resonance for many readers here in Singapore.
A note on subject matter: the book deals openly with terminal illness and death. The session will be facilitated with care, and the closing will hold space for what the conversation has surfaced.
About Our Beneficiary
HCA Hospice is Singapore's largest home hospice care provider and a registered charity since 1989. Their multidisciplinary teams — doctors, nurses, medical social workers, counsellors, and trained volunteers — make over 46,000 home visits a year, supporting patients with life-limiting illnesses and their families in the comfort of their own homes.
All of HCA's services are provided at no charge, supported entirely by the generosity of the community. Their care extends beyond medical support to include psychosocial and bereavement services for families, even after a patient has passed.
70% of contributions from Session 1 will go to HCA Hospice. 30% will support Soma Haus’ Sliding Scale Program.
About your Facilitators
Xin Yi is a counsellor at Soma Haus and a lifelong reader. Outside the clinic, she's part of the community at Casual Poet Library, a small independent library in Singapore, where she obsesses over books and occasionally volunteers as a librarian.
For Body of Word, she brings both threads of her life together: the reader's pleasure in being moved by language, and the therapist's instinct for holding what surfaces when we sit with different books.
Arathi Devandran is a writer and communications professional. Her creative non-fiction work sits at the intersection of identity, grief, and the personal essay, and has appeared in CNA, RIC Journal, Borderless, and the anthology Singapore At Home: Life Across Lines, among others. She is currently working on her first essay collection.
For Body of Word, she brings a reader's curiosity and a writer's instinct for the questions that live underneath a story. Writing and reading, for her, are inseparable — a continuous conversation between the self on the page and the self in the world, always in pursuit of what the human condition asks of us.
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