Are you joining us to discuss The Man with the Compound Eyes
How is it already almost May and the upcoming BIG summer break
It’s book club next week and I know most of you haven’t started yet… To me, The Man with the Compound Eyes is proving to be a slow read, so a moment of warning for you to start as soon as you can! I’m enjoying watching the story slowly unfold however and am curious to see where it goes and what the discussion will bring us.
What you need to know if you are joining our upcoming book club
We are meeting on the 1st of May at 20:00.
Our location is Opzoomerstraat 12C, Studio Tideland
The book club is Bring Your Own Booze, so bring drinks (at least) for yourself.
The book club is pay what you can which will help me to cover the location and snack costs. You can buy me a coffee or use a tikkie.
If you have snack ideas or other suggestions, hit me up!
Most importantly:
If you can’t make it, please let me know! I have some more people on the waiting list and I would love to inform them as early as possible.
What are we reading next month?
I asked for some ideas on instagram and got kind of excited about reading some new releases! So I picked two more recent books I heard good things about for you to pick from! There were many many more I wanted to share, but too many were not available yet, so they’ll have to wait for another month.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
Blackouts by Justin Torres
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay—playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized—has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories—moments of joy and oblivion—and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?
Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Páramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres's Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.
BIG Summer Break
After our June book club we’ll have a big summer break lasting until our next meeting again early October. So this will either give us plenty of time to read something big like last year’s House of Leaves or to read something easy and have plenty of time to dig into our own TBR’s. I’d love to hear your ideas on this and we’ll also discuss it at the next book club!
April Book Recommendation
A fantasy horror romance? Yes please!
Someone You Can Build a Nest In - John Wiswell
Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she's fallen in love.
Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.
However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.
Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?
Eating her girlfriend isn’t an option. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.
And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.
And a sneaky book rec that I really wanted to nominate for this poll but that wasn’t available.