Weird & Wonderful- White Noise

For the November meeting of City Lit's Weird & Wonderful book club, we discussed White Noise by Don DeLillo.

Described by DeLillo as a comedy about "technology, fear, and death", White Noise follows Jack Gladney, the head of the "Hitler Studies" department at a small university. Along with his fourth wife, Babette, and their gang of children from previous marriages, Jack must unexpectedly flee from an airborne toxic event that threatens their town; the cloud only heightens their vague but powerful fears of death, and even after returning home things are pretty weird.

Pretty weird, variously surreal and comic: we had a good discussion of this, with a big group. Notes and possible spoilers below:

Weird & Wonderful- We Have Always Lived in the Castle

For the October meeting of City Lit's Weird & Wonderful book club, we discussed We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

A superb horror/psychological thriller, the novel follows the survivors (and perpetrators) of a terrible crime years later. Brief notes and possible spoilers below.

Weird & Wonderful- A Cure for Suicide

For the August meeting of City Lit's Weird & Wonderful book club, we discussed Jesse Ball's A Cure for Suicide.

Told in a sparse, slightly surreal voice, the novel is set some great time in the future, and follows a character who has chosen to forget his old life in lieu of suicide.

A great discussion! An intriguing book! I mostly forgot to take notes!

Weird & Wonderful- China Mountain Zhang

For the July meeting of City Lit's Weird & Wonderful club, we discussed China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh. A fairly near-future tale, it follows its main character and a number of others through a world in which China has become the primary world power and humans are colonizing Mars, but does so in kind of a discursive, very human way.

We dug the heck out of this! Brief notes below:

Weird & Wonderful- Altered Carbon

For the June meeting of City Lit's Weird & Wonderful club, we discussed Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan.

A sex-and-violence-filled cyberpunk noir-ish tale, Altered Carbon is the first of Morgan's books featuring Takeshi Kovacs, P.I.-slash-cybercommando-ninja...guy. In a world where people are outfitted with devices that record their memories, allowing them to be re-implanted in another body, Kovacs is hired to solve a convuluted case involving shady politics, body-swapping, and powerful gerontocrat.

Super-brief notes after the jump:

Podcast #2- American Gods w/ While Reading and Walking's Leah von Essen

Happy to announce that our second podcast is live! We're joined by Leah von Essen from While Reading and Walking to talk about Neil Gaiman's American Gods, the television adaptation of which is premiering soon.

Download Directly (mp3) | RSS Feed | iTunes | Google Play

• 0- Introductions
• 2:42- Upcoming Events
• 4:42- Main Discussion
• 18:13- Thoughts on other Gaiman works & adaptations
• 25:14- "Hard Question" about belief & religion
• 32:25- Questions about Sandman & other gods appearing in American Gods
• 35:44- What else have you been reading?
• 38:08- Credits

Be sure to check out Leah's site, While Reading and Walking. You can also catch her on Book Riot, and I highly recommend following her on Twitter: @reading_while. Leah also mentions some reading projects like Read Diverse Books.

Besides American Gods, we reference many other works by Gaiman. Non-Gaiman references include:

• Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
• Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Binti and other works by Nnedi Okorafor
• The collection The Djinn Falls in Love, which includes stories by Gaiman, Okorafor, and many more.

Our events-reader this episode is Mary Auber from the Weird & Wonderful club, which meets at City Lit Books. You can find lots of meeting notes from Weird & Wonderful on Positron.

Our music is provided by Pelafina. Check them out on Facebook and Bandcamp!

Hope you like the show! Questions, comments? Sound off in the comments, or drop us a line at positronchicago@gmail.com.

Weird & Wonderful- Magic for Beginners

For the April meeting of City Lit Books' Weird & Wonderful book club, we discussed Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link.

The collection showcases Link's ability to draw on a host of genre techniques—most of these stories feel like they belong somewhere on a spectrum of horror-fantasy-surrealism—while also creating affecting human characters. "Kinda ghost-story-like" and "demented YA" were two terms we used.

As frequently and fruitfully happens at Weird & Wonderful, mixed opinions on this one! Brief notes below:

Weird & Wonderful- Wool

For the March meeting of City Lit Books' Weird & Wonderful book club, we discussed Wool (2012) by Hugh Howey.

Noted as a self-publication success, Wool is a post-apocalyptic tale that takes place in a self-contained silo. The inhabitants live with an absolute taboo around talking about the supposedly-deadly surface or the outside world, and this society's worst punishment is to send someone "for cleaning"—going outside to clean the external sensors, before inevitably dying despite precautions. The Wool omnibus gathers the first 5 chapters of the story, introducing us to a few different protagonists as they discover the truth behind their situation.

Brief notes and possible spoilers below!

Weird & Wonderful- A Taste of Honey

Another T. Sean Steele poster

For the February meeting of City Lit Books Weird & Wonderful club, we discussed Kai Ashante Wilson's 2016 novella A Taste of Honey.

Set in the same world as Wilson's The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (2015), A Taste of Honey is a kind of interrupted romance—chapters alternate between the 10-day affair of Aqib & Lucrio and the 7 decades of Aqib's life afterwards. There's magic here, gods and strange technologies, but the story focuses entirely on relationships.

Interesting discussion and unusually mixed reviews. Notes and possible spoilers below:

Weird & Wonderful- The Left Hand of Darkness

Art by Ratvis

January was one of those fortuitous months where some book-clubs synchronized for me: City Lit Books' Weird & Wonderful club discussed The Left Hand of Darkness, shorlty after the Chicago Nerds discussion. Winter is a good time to read "Left Hand", and it's pretty much always a good time to read Le Guin, regardless.

Well: if you're not familiar, The Left Hand of Darkness is a bedrock work of modern science fiction, exploring deep questions of gender and much beside. Set on a world where all humans are "cyclic hermaphrodites"--neuter most of the month, then briefly sexually active--the novel has as its Big Issue the question of what a truly sexually-equal human society might look like. But, as one might expect from Le Guin, it dives into tons of other ideas as well, and it's issues of betrayal and friendship that stick with me, at least, even more than the gender investigation.

Also, it's set in a society adapted for an ice age, which feels appropriate for a Chicago January read. I was so into the conversation that I didn't take the most comprehensive of notes, but you may find them, and possibly spoilers, below:

Weird & Wonderful- To Say Nothing of the Dog

For the last 2016 meeting of City Lit Books' Weird & Wonderful club, we discussed To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis's 1997 Hugo-winning comic time travel novel.

Set in the same world as the more serious "Fire Watch", The Doomsday Book, and others, To Say Nothing of the Dog follows a group of Oxford-based "historians"--time travelers--who study different periods. In this story, the mechanisms (and mechanics) of time travel have been pressed into service for a seemingly-trivial task by a wealthy philanthropist: tracking down decorative pieces of Coventry Cathedral through time, so that they can be either recovered or recreated in the time travelers' "present". Unlike Willis's other time-traveling stories, however, this one is predominantly comic (despite the possibility of collapsing the space-time continuum), reveling in wordplay, slapstick, and overt allusion and homage to its comic British inspirations, including P.G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome.

We quite liked the novel, and had a good, brief, and discursive discussion. Notes, possible spoilers, and spatiotemporal musings below:

Weird & Wonderful- The Island of Dr. Moreau

For the last meeting of the Weird & Wonderful club at City Lit Books, we discussed The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) by H.G. Wells. Spoiler: it's about a mad scientist who's turning animals into human-like creatures through surgical techniques.

By a considerable margin, this is the oldest work we've discussed, and it's intriguing how well it's held up. In addition to the strengths of the writing, we talked a lot about the novel in comparison to other stories of "going wild" and animal concerns, as well as The Island as a horror story. Brief notes below:

Weird & Wonderful- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

For the October meeting of City Lit's Weird & Wonderful bookclub, we discussed "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" (1987) by Douglas Adams.

Plot-wise, the novel is a bit of a tangle, involving time travel, ancient aliens, ghosts, clairvoyant detectives, and Samuel Coleridge (among other things), but we found it worth reading page-by-page just owing to Adams' style. Notes and possible spoilers below:

Weird & Wonderful- The Bone Clocks

For the September meeting of City Lit's Weird & Wonderful club, we discussed "The Bone Clocks" by David Mitchell.

Like some of Mitchell's other works, "The Bone Clocks" mixes genres a bit. It orbits around the character of Holly Sykes over basically her whole life, with long jumps to other characters' viewpoints. Holly is kind of mildly caught up in a war between two different kinds of immortals; the novel's latter chapters also bring us to a climate-change-induced semi-apocalypse.

We generally liked it, but this novel is mixed in several senses of the word. Possible spoilers, and definite editorializing, below:

Weird & Wonderful- Vermilion

For the last meeting of City Lit Books' Weird & Wonderful club, we discussed "Vermilion" (2015) by Molly Tanzer. "Vermilion" is the story of Lou Merriweather, a kind of professional exorcist in a fantastic 19th century American West who becomes embroiled in a sinister scheme. The world is somewhat steampunk, with a very healthy dose of the supernatural, along with some fanciful alt-history turns, such as the talking bears who alter the course of post-Civil War politics in the west.

We had a few criticisms, but by and large we found this very enjoyable, and reviewed it as solid beach read. Possible spoilers below!

Weird & Wonderful- House of Leaves

I can't believe it, one of my book clubs finally, successfully tackled Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves" (2000), monstrous, meta-textual, experimental doorstopper of a book that it is. What fun!
Okay, so it's too much to call it a premise, but it works kind of like this: the book you're holding was edited by unknown editors, who make a few clarifying comments. The main text was edited together by Johnny Truant, who added footnotes that run to many pages long, detailing his personal life. The text he edited is an academic text by one Zumpano, a scholarly examination of "The Navidson Record", a film that Zumpano, being blind, couldn't have seen. So there's 3 or 4 levels of fictionality here. Additionally, there's a lot of crazy stuff on the page—different colors for certain words, whole sections crossed out, recursive footnotes, text arranged in very nonstandard ways. Plus, it's like 700 pages.

Oh, and the Navidson Record is a horror story of sorts. All the narrative threads in here are horror stories, of sorts.

So! Reading & discussing this present...interesting challenges. Challenges that City Lit's Weird & Wonderful club rose to! Possible spoilers below:

Weird & Wonderful- We Who Are About To...

Much-delayed notes, part 1! Wiscon happened and absorbed me into its beautiful hive-mind for a while; so now I'm playing some catch-up.

Way back in the end of April, City Lit's Weird & Wonderful club discussed "We Who Are About To...", the 1976 novella by Joanna Russ.

Super-brief notes and total spoilers below:

Weird & Wonderful- Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

"Weird" and "wonderful" apply to most of Haruki Murakami's work, making his 1985 novel "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" a fitting selection for City Lit Books' book club of the strange & amazing.

The novel follows two very different threads in alternating chapters: in one, our narrator is a kind of cryptographer caught up in strange experiments and violent information wars. In the other, our narrator is the recently-arrived Dreamreader of a strange fantasy city, surreal and mythic. The two halves have very different styles and tones: Hard-Boiled, true to its name, has some similarities to a certain kind of crime fiction (somewhat akin to noir), while End of the World is written in a more spare, poetic style. To indicate differences in pronoun use and intimate voice not easily conveyed in English, translator Alfred Birnbaum also has the End of the World written in present tense.

We had an interesting discussion, particularly because we had a real mix of Murakami familiarity--one or two of us who'd read a good chunk of his work, a few of us having read one or two others, while this was the first Murakami novel for about half the group. Probable spoilers below!

SF/F Authors & the Vietnam War

At a Weird & Wonderful meeting at City Lit, we were talking about the various political schisms in SF/F, and I recalled hearing about a paid ad in the late 1960s where authors made a statement about their position on the Vietnam war. Weird & Wonderful's June selection is Le Guin's "The Word for World is Forest" (1972), a work responding to the war.

I was able to track it down (Galaxy, June 1968). Galaxy is now available for free from Archive.org.

Some context. First one here is an article from Science Fiction Studies:

• H. Bruce Franklin: "The Vietnam War as American Science Fiction and Fantasy" (1990)
• Nat Tilander: "Galaxy Magazine and the Vietnam War" (2011)
• Scott Edelman: "Which side are you on?" (2014)
• Alex Cox: "American Science Fiction Authors and the Vietnam War" (2014)
• SF Forward: "SF Vietnam Petition" (2015) 
•  i09 had a piece a while back on how SF authors' military experiences affected their writing.

For ease of reading, here's a transcription of the ad. I tried to catch any misspellings:

Weird & Wonderful- Roadside Picnic

This SF Masterworks cover
presumably depicts a (full?) empty.

City Lit's most recent Weird & Wonderful discussion was "Roadside Picnic" by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky, written in 1971 but with a mildly convoluted publication/translation history.

The novel sketches out a few different characters in relation to one of the "Zones", areas that have been transmuted by an ambiguous alien visitation. The source of ineffable (but sometimes highly-profitable) technology as well as strange and deadly disasters, the Zones are studied and salvaged by government bodies as well as criminal organizations, with "Stalkers"--people who specialize in illegally entering the zone to procure artifacts--selling to both.

Short, stylish, rich in ideas, and highly weird, this was a fun novel to discuss. And we also had a delightful picnic ourselves! Possible spoilers below:

Weird & Wonderful- The Shining Girls

Lauren Beukes' 2013 novel "The Shining Girls" was the most recent pick for City Lit's Weird & Wonderful club.

"The Shining Girls" is the story of Harper, a time-travelling serial killer, as he is hunted down by Kirby, one of his victims who survived the attack. Curiously (Beukes is South African), it's set in Chicago. We follow our murderer around in quite a few different decades; the well-researched city details were high points in the reading & discussion.

We spent a lot of time untangling the time travel narrative and debating what we think about all the murders. A fun read, for sure, though. Possible spoilers below:

Weird & Wonderful- The Crane Wife

For our first bookclub of 2016, Weird & Wonderful gathered at City Lit Books to discuss Patrick Ness's 2013 novel, "The Crane Wife".

It's "not" a retelling of the classic tale, though it does draw some of its basic mechanics from it: there's a shape-shifting, magical crane, with amazing creative powers. This story is set in modern-day England, and focuses on an expatriate American, George, and his daughter Amanda, as well as Kumiko, the titular crane.

While we all agreed that the book had worthwhile bits, our overall consensus was quite negative, generally due to the feeling that it seriously flubs its own myth-making. Spoilers below:

Weird & Wonderful: Rosemary's Baby

For City Lit's Weird & Wonderful Halloween selection, we read Ira Levin's “Rosemary's Baby” (1967), noted for its 1968 Polanski film adaptation (and apparently an upcoming miniseries, as well). Considered a modern horror classic and a turning point in the genre, creating or at least popularizing a certain vein of religiously-colored horror, it reads now as a bit dated in some repsects, suprisingly fresh in others.

Our conversation circled around a few major points:

• Witches Are Silly (no offense, Actual Witches)
• “Workmanlike Prose”
• Spookiness & Lack of Spookiness

A good discussion, as always, and pleased to welcome some new folks to the club as well. Total spoilers below.

Weird & Wonderful: Railsea

For September's meeting of City Lit's Weird & Wonderful book club, we talked about China Miéville's 2011 YA novel, "Railsea". Weird & Wonderful had previously read (and greatly enjoyed discussing) his language-centered 2011 novel, "Embassytown", and while the lighter, younger-reader-targeted "Railsea" doesn't strike quite as many sparks as some of his other work, we had a lovely discussion.

Miéville is at the center of the "New Weird" genre/movement, rather analogous to Gibson's position with the early cyberpunks. The New Weird isn't terribly well-defined, but tends to involve a mixture of tropes from horror, SF, and fantasy, often with an urban setting or sensibility, and generally criticize or unsettle generic conventions.

"Railsea" is very quickly established as a weird "Moby Dick" (1851) homage with a very strange setting and a lot of other influences and references, as well as some strange (and overt) narrative/stylistic choices. At group we found this to be one of those books that got better for being talked about, or perhaps one of those books that's in some ways more satisfying to discuss than it was to read. Possible spoilers below!

Weird & Wonderful: Bird Box

For the August's meeting of City Lit's "Weird and Wonderful" book club, we read Josh Malerman's "Bird Box" (2014), a pretty unusual apocalypse/horror novel.

We quite liked the book, stylistically--it's lean, without a lot of world or character building. For those of us tired of the word-bloat that frequently infects modern genre lit, this was a definite positive. We also praised the creepy effectiveness (effective creepiness?) of a few different passages.

While "Bird Box" doesn't feel derivative, we wound up comparing it to a lot of other horror/insanity/neurohacking/apocalyptic what-have-you (whew!) so expect lots of referenced works, and probably SPOILERS BELOW:

Weird & Wonderful: My Real Children

We had a small group but a lovely discussion of Jo Walton's "My Real Children" (2014) at City Lit's Weird & Wonderful Book Club last week. Walton's novel is a kind of double-alternate history with deep reflections on family and ageing: Patricia, our protagonist, lived two very different lives, and is remembering both of them as she falls into dementia in a nursing facility.

The strongly science-fictional elements are mostly off screen (alternate history of space travel, medicine & technology, world politics), and since they're not very central to Patricia's life we don't get too much about them--but finding those little clues about the different worlds is one of the treats of reading this. The fantastic here lies in the dissonance/resonance between Patricia's two lives, not in any science fictional or fantastic elements within them. Each timeline kind of overlays the other, so even as you're getting wrapped up in Tricia's life, you remember that things are different in Pat's. It's a very strange and interesting effect.

Weird & Wonderful: Stories of Your Life

For the last meeting of City Lit Books' "Weird and Wonderful" club, we discussed Ted Chiang's "Stories of Your Life and Others" (2002).

What a collection! This is a book I frequently recommend to people--it's a great example of some of the best kinds of things being done in SF today. It doesn't hurt that Chiang is one of the strongest short-form writers out there. The collection also frequently makes it into SF/F reading groups: I know at least Think Galactic & Chicago Nerds have discussed it.

We read and discussed (at least briefly) all the stories herein,  and given the nature of short stories there may be SPOILERS BELOW!

Weird & Wonderful: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

For the last meeting of City Lit Book's "Weird & Wonderful" book club, we talked about Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

It is definitely a weird and wonderful read. The elephant in the room, of course, is Ridley Scott's 1982 adaptation of the book as the film "Bladerunner", which is wildly different, and at this point usually what people encounter first--I know it was for me. Personally, going back and reading "Do Androids Dream" the first time was a very strange experience. It's not that "Bladerunner" is a bad adaption, it's that it goes off at such an angle--it's almost like a parallel work.

We had to talk for a bit about those differences, particularly in tone and style (plot deviations are large enough to barely warrant discussion). The book doesn't read as a noir/PI/Dashiel Hammett kind of tale, at all, the dominant feel of the film. And where "Bladerunner" has a visual aesthetic of dark, neon-lit, punky/polluted futurism, "Do Androids Dream" struck us as overwhelming run-down, dusty, brown and grey, and not particularly futuristic (excepting the flying cars).

Weird & Wonderful: The Humans by Matt Haig

Matt Haig's "The Humans" (2013) is the story of an alien sent to Earth to impersonate a mathematician who has solved the Riemann Hypothesis, in order to destroy all evidence of the solution. However, the mission goes awry when the complexity and emotional richness of the titular hoo-mans seduces our narrator. A fun though aggravating read, and a great discussion with City Lit's "Weird & Wonderful" book club.

Spoilers below!

Weird & Wonderful: Kindred

Much-delayed meeting notes! The last convocation of City Lit Books' "Weird & Wonderful" reading group discussed Octavia Butler's "Kindred" (1979), now considered a classic--probably why the Classic SF Meetup discussed it a while back.


In the novel, a modern black woman is mysteriously transported back to the early 19th century to save a drowning boy, who she later deduces is her ancestor. Dana is then transported back and forth several times--called back to save Rufus Weylin whenever his life is in danger, and sent forward to her own time whenever her life is in peril.

"Kindred" is almost certainly Butler's most-discussed work (I first ran into it in an undergrad lit class SO LONG AGO), which is interesting given how "non-genre" this reads. Unlike Butler's other works, which are clearly "genre" (aliens, vampires, post-apocalypse, etc.), "Kindred" purposefully downplays its one weird element--the time travel--allowing it read more as a mainstream, literary novel. At group we talked about shelving and genre decisions, how that affects how people read; I'm vastly amused to imagine slow, passive-aggressive category debates carried out by furtive re-shelvers.

Other things we discussed in relation to the novel:

Weird & Wonderful: Snow Crash

At last month's Weird & Wonderful discussion of Max Barry's "Lexicon" (2013), we decided we pretty much had to read Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" (1992): "Lexicon"'s core mechanic of neuro-linguistic hacking seems to be borrowed or at least inspired by "Snow Crash", or at any rate from similar sources.

Furthermore, "Snow Crash" is just delightful, really bonkers, and either the apotheosis of the cyberpunk movement or its satiric denouement, one really can't tell. The novel is laughably hard to summarize: the search for the cure to an ancient alien mega-virus that manifests in biological, linguistic/religious, and computerized forms, set in a tech-filled, corporate-franchised/libertarian-anarchic vision of America (and also an elaborate virtual world, the Metaverse), by a hacker-prince/master swordsman named Hiro Protagonist and a 15 year-old skateboard courier named Yours Truly, all of which packaged with a hundred or so pages of Sumerian mythology and a healthy dose of early Christian (alt-?) history; other key players include a mutant obsidian knife-wielding superman named Raven, the Mafia (and they're the good guys!), and a supersonic radioactive pit bull cyborg . Whew! If that doesn't sell you, I don't know what to say. Possible spoilers below!

Weird & Wonderful: Lexicon

It felt like it had been far too long since I had the pleasure of attending City Lit's "Weird & Wonderful" book club, and last Wednesday's discussion of Max Barry's "Lexicon" (2013) was a delightful return! The novel uses a science-fictional concept (controlling people by means of neurolinguistic "hacking") but is done more in the mode of a thriller. We all quite enjoyed it, and while our discussion focused more on the ideas than the plot, there may be SPOILERS BELOW:

Weird & Wonderful: "Oryx & Crake" (and "The Sparrow", actually)

Small meeting last night, but we had a good discussion--discussions plural, really. Paul & I had both missed last month's meetings on Mary Doria Russell's "The Sparrow" (1996), and wanted to talk about it--Conrad wanted to chew on it some more, also. So that was good! Then we turned our attention to Margaret Atwood's "Oryx & Crake" (2003) as well. Spoilers below!