October Book Club Options

Hey folks,

It's time for us to vote on what we'll read as a community throughout October!

We read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller for our September read, and I found it to be a well-written, satirical look at war, bureaucracy, the military-industrial complex, and the American psyche.

If you haven't read Catch-22 and are a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, I think you'll really enjoy it.

We've got six titles up for vote in October. As always, I combed meticulously through my personal collection to find stories that felt curious and intentional and would spark broad discussion in the community Discord.

The ability to vote, and tkae part in the discussion channels unlock at the paid tiers, so if you're a "Follower", you'll need to upgrade to join in with the rest of the community to discuss the book throughout the month.

Along with the book club discussion, becoming a paid member gives you access to the full Discord experience where we share book recommendations, set up buddy reads with fellow members, talk about pets, sports, and everything else cool humans chat about!

All that said, here are the titles we'll be voting on for our October book club read.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.

Ginster by Siegfried Kracauer

Ginster is a war novel about not going to war; about how war, far from the front, comes to warp every aspect of outer and inner life and to infect the workings of language itself. The subject is World War I, but this novel by the brilliant twentieth-century sociologist, journalist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1928, has as much to say about what it means to live under the sulking great powers and blood-imbrued satrapies of today as it does about the inflamed self-righteousness of late imperial Germany. In Ginster, as in Greek tragedy, massacre occurs offstage, arriving only as "news," but the everyday horror of a society engineered for the continual production of violence is not to be denied. Ginster, the Chaplinesque antihero, intent chiefly on saving his own skin, works hard to keep his distance from the war machine, and yet making a living, he discovers, is all about keeping it running. How different, in the end, is his dreamy self-absorption from the empty military language that has come to pervade every aspect of civilian life in the homeland?

May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry

A curator spends her days reconstructing the past—selecting and carefully arranging furniture, fabrics, and fragments of daily life to bring medieval rooms back to life. Whether it’s a feast with spilling platters or a table for two littered with small hints of intimacy, it must appear as if the people have just left the room.

After accepting a commission to work on the private quarters of a medieval palace, the curator becomes absorbed in the story of a king almost forgotten by history. As she studies the traces he left behind, the boundary between her own life and his begins to blur.

The King is an unlikely ruler: a man with little appetite for power, hurried to the throne after the sudden deaths of his brothers. At court, doubts about his judgment are whispered from chamber to chamber. Then an unthinkable possibility emerges among the gossip: maybe someone else will take the crown.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, some with sex or drink, and some—like Mick—with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by Emma Southon

In A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Southon examines a trove of real-life homicides from Roman history to explore Roman culture, including how perpetrator, victim, and the act itself were regarded by ordinary people. Inside Ancient Rome's darkly fascinating history, we see how the Romans viewed life, death, and what it means to be human.

Romulus killed Remus to found the city, Caesar was assassinated to save the Republic. Caligula was butchered in the theater, Claudius was poisoned at dinner, and Galba was beheaded in the Forum. In one 50-year period, 26 emperors were murdered.

Part cultural history, part true-crime investigation, and part portrait of everyday life in the ancient world, this entertaining bestseller explores everyone from emperors and aristocrats to slaves, gladiators, spouses, parents, and children, uncovering how Romans understood murder and why some deaths mattered far more than others.

The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz

In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is assigned to write a routine German lesson on the “The Joys of Duty.” Overfamiliar with these joys, Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, a constable, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist artist from painting and to seize all his “degenerate” work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, “where the joys of duty could lead a people.”

How To Vote

Voting will be live through Sunday, October 28th. We'll be using ranked choice voting to determine what book we'll be reading, which you can vote on here.