UPDATE: So I submitted "Earth Abides" per kleinbl00's recommendation. The group is excited about reading it so we'll see how it goes :)
Any good recommendations? We have a small book club at work that has been going on for about 5-6 years and it's my turn to pick (just finished 10.000 Doors). Only fiction, with a wide range but light science fiction, thrillers, historical and historical fantasy seem to be a common theme recently. I am torn between Dark Matter by Blake Crouch or Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel now but wondering if they are too hard sci-fi for the group.
Edit per Dala's recommendation. These are books we have read before (most recently read is at the bottom):
2013
- Zone One
- Snow Crash - I liked, but not a group favorite
- Boomsday
- Let the Great World Spin
- Warm Bodies
- Manual of Detection
- The Ocean at the End of the Lane
- Bright lights Big City
- Graceland
2014
- Dandelion Wine - everyone hated this book
- And Then There Were None
- The Land of Steady Habits
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
- The Dog Stars - group favorite
- The Girl with All the Gifts
- Survivor
2015
- Ringworld
- Deep Down Dark
- Collision Low Crossers
- The Martian - group favorite
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
- The Narrow Road to t he Deep North
- Practical Demon keeping
- Six of Crows
- A Brief History of Seven Killings
2016
- Stone Mattress - not a group favorite.
- When Breath Becomes Air
- I'm Thinking of Ending Things
- The Girl on the Train - everyone liked this (this was before the movie)
- Send More Idiots
- The Big Sheep
- Life After Life
2017
- The Handmaid's Tale - great discussion on this one during the election
- Dark Matter - I guess we did read this book but totally forgot about it, ugh age is getting to me.
- Sing Unburied Sing
- The Undoing Project
2018 - club died for a bit this year.
- A Man called Ove
2019 - Left the club, work was overwhelming, so didn't read these :'(
- The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls
- The River: A novel
- American Spy: A Novel
- The Nickel Boys: A Novel
2020 - back in the club this year.
- 10,000 Doors
My two recommendations would be Roadside Picnic by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky And Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. Roadside Picnic is a 1972 Soviet novella about a hazmat site created by a chance alien encounter and the people who live off the bits and bobs stolen from it. And the drastic impact on their life. It's perhaps the most Soviet story I know. If Science Fiction is about provoking us to contemplate the alien, Roadside Picnic and Solaris are perhaps peak sci fi. Earth Abides isn't science fiction, but it's been advertised as such for like 70 years. George Stewart was not a science fiction writer, he was a naturalist/historian who was tasked with writing a 1940s "World Without Us" by Collier's (if I recall correctly) and interspersed the factual paragraphs with little point-of-view vignettes from an observer watching the natural world take over the human one. He got about 10,000 words into it and called Collier's up and apologized because he was afraid he had to turn the thing into a novel. The point-of-view vignettes became the book and the factual paragraphs became the interstitials. It is, without a doubt, the best post-apocalyptic novel ever written. It is also, without a doubt, the one nearly no one has read. If you want to find someone who has, stand up in a crowd and say "I really enjoyed Alas, Babylon!" Keep your eye out for the angry person about to hit you. He's read Earth Abides and he thinks you should, too, but first you need to be punished. Earth Abides was the book that drove Stephen King to write The Stand, Jimi Hendrix to record "Third Stone from the Sun" and Neil Druckman to create The Last of Us. I would read Ken Grimwood's Replay before I'd read anything from 2016 and I would read Earth Abides long lonnnnng before I'd read Station Eleven. light science fiction, thrillers, historical and historical fantasy seem to be a common theme recently.
My wife is a big fan of Bradbury. I'm less of one. I think he had a few interesting ideas but mostly he lyrically describes boring things that don't matter. He was never an ideas guy, and ideas are the core of sci fi. I fucking hate Margaret Atwood. The core of every Margaret Atwood story is "selfless woman betrays her values when she foolishly falls in love with an idiot man who is evil."
I mean Herbert's "Dune" is an absolute classic and can easily be taken in as just one book without delving into the series. I'm also a big Kim Stanley Robinson fan and really loved his book "2312" for its seemingly very realistic depiction of humanity in the far future. Very hard-science fiction which can make it a little dense at times but well worth it in my opinion.
I gotta second KB's suggestion of "Earth Abides". Especially after seeing that "The Martian" was a favorite for your group. While very different stories, the core is similar: you are deeply living inside the story, from the narrator's perspective, and the narrator is trying to process and understand what is happening around them and how to deal with these events. Earth Abides is not exciting. And that's part of the beauty of it, and why it has stuck with me... the story lives and continues long after you have read it. The pace of the book is the pace of the seasons and the years. You FEEL the passage of time, but it doesn't get boring or need a big action scene to keep you interested. I read the book for the first time several years ago, and I honestly think about it most days.
For sure feel free to pick up the #scificlub tag and make a thread about it. I’d be glad to follow along with what you do next if it’s also here on Hubski!
I’d put Station Eleven more in the speculative fiction genre than hard sf, and perhaps that is the issue if your group is looking for funny aliens or someone other than us to be the bad guy. Not sure what I could suggest for you as a group read. Let’s ask: What have you read so far as a group, and what was the group’s thought on the works? Maybe that will help us make suggestions.
I haven’t been active in them, but we have some great threads in #scifi, #scificlub and #hubskibookclub. Some people comment on their good reads in those. EDIT: Can't find the notepad with hubski book threads on my desktop, must have cleared it out.