Science Fiction and Fantasy book club reading list for 2009/2010

The still mostly librarians science fiction and fantasy book club met today for their annual book selection for extended fiscal year 2009/2010. We have been having troubles finding a date to meet in the middle of summer so selected enough books this time to get us to fall 2010.

Here are the books we will be reading. Read along and comment if you'd like.

2009/08 Doctorow, Cory / Little Brother (SF)

2009/09 Farmer, Nancy / The House of the Scorpion (SF)

2009/10 Haldeman, Joe / Camouflage (SF)

2009/11 Bujold, Lois McMaster / Sharing Knife: Beguilement (Fantasy)

2009/12 LeGuin, Ursula K. / Left Hand of Darkness (Classic)

2010/01 Vance, Jack / Last Castle (SF)

2010/02 Bulgakov, Mikhail / Master and Margarita (Fantasy)

2010/03 Stirling, S.M. / Court of the Crimson Kings (Alternate history)

2010/04 Turtledove, Harry / Rule Britannia (Alternate history)

2010/05 Grimwood, Ken / Replay (Speculative)

2010/06 Butcher, Jim / Furies of Calderon (Fantasy)

2010/07 Stross, Charles / Saturn's Children (Space opera)

2010/08 Brooks, Max / World War Z (Fantasy)

2010/09 Bellamy, Edward / Looking Backward (Classic)

Memes and reading

A meme caught my fancy so I'm passing it on for the one reader of this blog. A meme is idea or behavior that passes from one person to another.

This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• A Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin (gripped me from the first paragraph)
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian : a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera (on my shelf waiting to be read)
• Brave New World
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

School was so long ago that I probably have read most of the classics, but honestly do not remember. I have kept a list of every book I've read since graduate school days. My list is now in a database with over 1,200 titles.

So many books, so little time.

Mostly librarians SF/F complete list of books discussed

I've just published a Google spreadsheet of the books that have been discussed since mid-1996 of our nameless science fiction and fantasy book club. I've been a member of the group since late 1998. I'm hoping other members of the group will add comments. Annotations came from the NLS (National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped) catalog, a nice source for brief descriptions of books.

For your reading pleasure: The list Note, there are two tabs/pages as there is a limit of 100 rows per tab.

Mostly librarians science fiction/fantasy book club

I am coming up to 10 full years of participating in a science fiction and fantasy book club. Established years earlier by a group of state agency librarians, the group has been meeting monthly for lunch and book discussion at a downtown location near most of our workplaces.

We have members from a number of agencies, including the state library, the secretary of state's office, corrections, and now several lucky retirees. Some members are extremely well-read and knowledgeable about SF and fantasy, for others each author and book are a new experience. We gather once a (fiscal) year for a pot-luck on a weekend to choose the books for the coming year. We try to have a nice mix of genres, with at least one classic and usually a vampire book for one fan of that genre. One member is an expert in horror, so his suggestions are highly valued.

Here are the books we will be reading this fiscal year (thank you RF for compiling the list.) Read along and comment if you'd like. I'm hoping to soon create an online spreadsheet or database to list all the titles that have been read in the last eleven years.


8/08 Chabon, Michael / The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (alternative history)

9/08 Miller Jr., Walter M. / Canticle for Leibowitz (classic post-apocalyptic)

10/08 McDevitt, Jack / Seeker (space opera, archaeology, mystery)

11/08 Zelazny, Roger / A Night in the Lonesome October (fantasy)

12/08 Stirling, S.M. / Dies the Fire (post-apocalyptic)

1/09 Adams, Douglas / Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (comic sci-fi)

2/09 Robinson, Kim S. / The Years of Rice and Salt (alternative history)

3/09 Hill, Joe / Heart-Shaped Box (horror, ghost story)

4/09 Huxley, Aldous / Brave New World (classic dystopia)

5/09 Scalzi, John / The Android’s Dream (interstellar diplomacy, satire)

6/09 Maguire, Gregory / Wicked: the Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West (fantasy, cautionary tale)

7/09 Meyers, Stephenie / The Host (alien invasion)