The Kipple Bookclub discussion

Hello all! Do we want to start meeting up again? If so, when? How often? And as always, looking for suggestions on what to read.

Books \o/

I think the monthly format works well, as it gives (in theory) everyone enough time to read no matter how busy life may be or their usual reading speed.

With regard to finding books, I've got about a dozen recommendations from a friend (Barry!) though there's a number of Peter Hamilton in there, aka 900+ pages books :P We might also want to try again looking through past award lists (Hugo, Nebula, etc). If I remember correctly that's where we found books like Rainbow's End or The Martian, which turned out to be pretty cool stories!

any plans on the meet up ?

I'd love to see the book club back again, so if we're restarting I'm in.

My heart is warmed to see enthusiasm! What do people think of the Friday before the Open Socials (third week)? Or the week before (second week)? Or are we against Fridays completely?

Yeah, count me in. I'm against Friday on principal, but if that's the only day available, the third Friday of the month is better than the last Friday.

I've been taking suggestions from the '100 best Sci-Fi books since 1980' or some such title - thought I had it with me but no, it's been one of those early-onset-of-alzheimer's weeks.

[later that day] Aha. It's called 'Science Fiction The 101 Best Novels 1985 - 2010' with a foreword by David Pringle and not a whiff of punctuation in the title. If some / any / all of these below turn out to be stinkers, blame Mssrs Damien Broderick and Paul di Filippo who had nothing better to do than to compile this "essential reference work" (quotation marks mine).

Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis (1992); time travel
Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers (1995); artificial intelligence ("transrealist metafiction", it says here, mmm, that's my *favourite* flavour of metafiction).
Super-Cannes, by J.G. Ballard (2000); because it's J.G. Ballard. No arguments.
Under the Skin, by Michel Faber (2000); horror sci-fi recently made into a film, so you could get away with not reading the book I suppose.
Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan (2002); cyberpunk private eye.
The Wind-Up Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi (2009); read a lot of good things about it.

I haven't checked these for length. I don't think I'd be able to get through anything longer than 400 pages in a single month, but I'd be happy to tackle some of Neal Stephenson's stuff or Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy over a couple of months.

Fridays are good for me

Giant Electronic Brian wrote: "[later that day] Aha. It's called 'Science Fiction The 101 Best Novels 1985 - 2010' with a foreword by David Pringle and not a whiff of punctuation in the title. If some / any / all of these below ..."

'Doomsday Book' is 578pgs, and one of our members gave it a 1 star review.
'Altered Carbon' is 526pgs. (But looks quite good so I'm adding it to my personal list.)

All the others I'll add to the group. Good job!

But I don't recommend just watching 'Under the Skin', it was rather art-house and lacking in explainations. So I'm actually quite looking forward to reading the book :)

Glad to see people looking forward to it :) But, due to new rules about running events in tog I have to find a couple more members to agree to help run it. I'll work on it!

I don't mind helping if you need support in organising the club

Hm. I suppose I should become a member sometime. But not next week, busy until the 18th Apr.