Ad Hoc Book Club Returns!

Hi,

So beah and I sometimes run something we call Ad-Hoc Book Club.  We pick a book, give ourselves about a month to read it and then hang out and chat about it (ideally with a few other people who’d read it along with us). We did the first one in late November a couple years ago so that when we were circulating among holiday parties, we’d have something to talk about (both with other readers and with people who were like “so what are you doing these days?”).

You can easily infer that we’re planning on running another one of these. In the past we’ve used these readings to tackle more “literary” works, things that we might not normally try. But both of us are doing poorly enough on the reading front as it is, and so we’re thinking of something a bit shorter and sweeter.

Thus our book selection is The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Vol. 13., edited by Jonathan Strahan. Over 30 authors with a wide range of voices give a wide-ranging survey of 2019 and speculative fiction. We’re hoping that an anthology of short stories will be easier to work through than one longer novel.

To that end, we encourage you to read as much of it as you can, but feel free to drop or skip stories that aren’t grabbing you. We hope you’ll find a few things you really like and perhaps get introduced to some great new writers.

Here’s the amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Science-Fiction-Fantasy-Thirteen-ebook/dp/B07PSNBK3B

My plan is that the club officially “starts reading” next Friday, May 22nd. Usually we give about a month for these things so we’ll
probably organize our zoom discussion meeting around the end of June -- we can pretend to be at the summer barbeque where we’d be talking with folks about all the neat short stories we read. Feel free to invite other people to join in with us if you think they’d be interested.  Anyone who wants to read along should please ping me so I can let them know when the discussion meeting will be held.

Happy Reading!
Tom