For CBR12 we’re planning three book clubs that we hope will inspire you to pick up a new to you book or reread something and consider it again.
On March 20th and 21st we’ll celebrate five years of #CannonBookClub and revisit our first book – Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. We have lots of new faces, as well as plenty of us who have been around since Cannonball Read 7 so it seemed the perfect time to revisit one of my favorite books and one that leads to really interesting group discussion.
Here’s the description from Goodreads in case you are unfamiliar with the book: One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.
June 19th and 20th we’ll be celebrating Pride Month the Cannonball way with a The Future is Queer book club focusing on speculative and science fiction written by and/or featuring LGBTQ+ characters. We’ve selected a group of four books – you choose whichever one (or more) you want to read – and we’ll gather back here to discuss. We’ve done some checking and these books seem to be pretty widely available, although on average they are slightly higher than our usual price point so we’re giving you the full list now in case you want to put in some purchase requests with your local library and help diversify their holdings as well as your reading appetite.
The books we’ll be choosing among to read:
- The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
- The Disasters by M.K. England
- I Hope You Get This Message by Farah Naz Rishi
- An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
Our third and final book club of the year will be October 16th and 17th and we’ll circle back around to Emily St. John Mandel and her newest book, The Glass Hotel being released in March of 2020 (again, we’re giving you lots of lead time as new books can sometimes be tougher to come by). The Glass Hotel is being described as “a captivating novel of money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it.” and I’m very intrigued to find out what that’s all about.
I’ll be back in a couple weeks with a reminder post for Station Eleven and a peek at our discussion topics, until then… happy reading!
