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!

• It's a kind of a Murakami-esque tale—we referred back to our discussion of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
• Huge debate over whether this is dystopian or not.
• A lot of discussions about the ethics of intentional forgetting. Comparisons made to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Also thought of SF that deals with this kind of self-editing, including Watts' Blindsight and a few different works by Egan.
• Tons of praise (with some dissent) for the writing itself.
• Related my realization, which didn't hit me until I finished the book and got to the "about the other" blurb, that I've been serving this guy coffee for years. Weird!

Apologies for terribly-short notes, I think I was just too caught up in discussion for this one. Weird & Wonderful clubs and many other wonderful events can be found on the City Lit Books website.