Five Bubble Book Club discussion

At the June meeting, Eric asked for suggestions of new themes to follow July's discussion of "Journey." Here are a few:

* "New" space opera -- not so much newly written, but as distinct from the older, less literary style of space opera (e.g., the "ravening beams and corruscating rays" and cardboard characters of "Doc" Smith). Authors could include Iain M. Banks, Peter F. Hamilton, and Vernor Vinge.

* *punk -- cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk, dieselpunk, etc. (I'd be OK with breaking these out into multiple months too -- each is a rich sub-genre!)

* "Caper" -- a clever, funny crime story.

* "Detective" or "Police Procedural" -- the flip side of a caper.

* "Spooky" -- for October. Yes, we did "Horror" last year, but there is a lot to mine in that topic.

* "Turkeys" -- for November we could read a really bad book. (The Eye of Argon, anybody?)

* "Winter/Holiday" -- for December.

* "Sword & Sorcery" -- or "Sword and Singularity" if people prefer the more modern form.

We discussed some of these in an earlier topic: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/....

Feel free to chime in with more topics and/or book suggestions!

Love it.
It would be really cool if we can make the bad book theme work.

The terrifying thing is that someone wrote a reboot of The Eye of Argon: Grïgnyr the Ecordian: A Retelling of The Eye of Argon.

On the other hand, there is George Orwell's notion of the "good bad book" -- works like Conan which despite clear literary faults survive the test of time better than many so-called "good books." Here's his essay: http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/book.... "Good bad books" would be a better pool to draw from than genuine turkeys.

Here are two more themes for you:

- Secret Histories -- what is really going on...

- The New Weird -- a parallel to New Space Opera: weird tales with some literary merit.