This was a really excellent collection of stories. Most of these are interconnected stories that I'm never sure are just memoirs of Berlin's life or are fictional where she just took aspects of her life; where she lived, family issues, her medical and addiction conditions and just extrapolated. Either way they were really good. Gave me the same sort of vibes as when I read Larry Brown's Tiny Love

Listened on audio. This is one of Heinlein's early novels and it won the Hugo and I'm not sure why. A powerful politician is kidnapped, so his people hire an actor to impersonate him, because he is part of a push to get the Martian world and its people added to the consolidated government of the solar system. I guess that's the scifi aspect, but otherwise its just a political intrigue story. It was okay. It does tick one off my Hugo bucket list.

A pretty good story written by Whoopi Goldberg about a woman who's menopause symptoms gives her superpowers. Interesting ideas, however the drawing style is a little jarring to me, maybe too "perfect". I guess after reading a lot of artsy books like Saga or True Country, I'm a little jaded. (ETA - perfect isn't the right word, don't know what is, just seems off, too stiff)

Listened on audio. This is Romero's final zombie opus (and opus it is), he had been writing this in various forms for most of his life and never completed it. The family asked Daniel Kraus (Whalefall) to finish it. Its an epic story of the zombie apocolypse that Romero started, but taken in interesting directions. He focus's initially on how it started, from looking at a medical examiner's office, who see's things kick off, a TV News studio reporting on what's happening, and an aircraft carrier, which is the ultimate closed door horror setting. Then he jumps ahead to see how people are surviving years down the road, where we ultimately find that the bad guys aren't necessarily the zombies. He had a pretty interesting take on the mechanics/inner workings of zombies that I haven't seen done before. He must have taking his writing queues from Stephen King cause this book is a doorstop (27 hours, 650+ pages), it probably could have done with some editing, but, heck, what are you going to do, its George Romero. If you're into horror and zombies, a good read.

This was a delightful little graphic novel about Mahdavian (Iranian immigrant and his wife moving from San Francisco to the wilds of Idaho and their experiences trying to homestead, survive nature and the culture shock of the local culture. Very good read.

LeGuin's first book. Rocannon is a scientist from Earth doing a survey of the native sentient species. After an invasion, Rocannon has to help save the people of the planet, and in doing so, his legend grows. TBH, this one didn't really work for me, but I like her and I'll continue on reading her stuff. I've always loved Left Hand of Darkness, and have heard great things about The Dispossessed

This was a really good read, and I think an important one for everyone. I read it many years ago, and my main memory is of the conditions of working in a meat processing plant, but its so much more. Jurgis, the main character is sort of a Walter Mitty of the early 20th century immigrant experience. He and his family come to America, find a house, get taken advantage of. Work in amazingly poor conditions in the plant, then things start to go wrong, he looses his job, gets arrested, looses his wife and child. He moves from meat packing, to a fertilizer plant, to living as a hobo, is a scab working against labor, then he works for labor, turns to a life of crime, then political corruption, then ultimately Socialism. It was a whirlwind. An excellent read. I had it on the shelf already, but I read it as a memorial read for Anita, it was one of her top 50 reads.

This I picked up on a whim. I read Stands on Zanzibar many years ago, and thought I'd try this out. This is a future dystopia of corrupt corporations and out of control pollution. It chronicles a year in the demise of the United States. It was a decent read, but again, not one that I really connected with.

Read on Audio. A very interesting of somewhat interconnected micro-stories that seem like you're stepping into someone's life to see a little slice of their life and quickly stepping out. Had, at times, a kinda Twilight Zone vibe. Lots of different narrators, including, Chuck Klosterman, Bret Easton Ellis and Michael Stipe. A fun quick read.

This was a fun little book. A collection of interviews with famous Pittsburghers, about their times growing up. Some famous only locally, many everyone knows. From Tony Dorsett, Joe Namath and Dan Marino who played Sports Ball, to Jeff Goldblum, Billy Porter and Rob Marshall in Entertainment, Mark Cuban in Business and Michael Hayden, CIA director in the Aughts. Interesting collection

This was a very nice little collection of short stories and essays. There's a story about what happens after you are thawed out from having your head cryogenically frozen. Another is about what happens on the night shift monitoring nanobots harvesting asteroids for resources. And a really odd story about a tapir that escapes from the San Diego Zoo and gets a job. A quick read.

Oh my goodness, what did I just read? Maybe I'm just not worthy. It was supposedly up for the Pulitzer in 1974, but they didn't give an award that year. Very dense, very disjointed, in my opinion. Very graphic, had some of the most shocking sex scenes I've ever read (and I'm no blushing violet). He touched on some fetishes that I didn't even know were real. The main crux of the story is the German rocket program and the allies trying to find this one special rocket via very phallic means. The saving grace was George Guidall, who narrated the audio, even at 1.6x, which I had to do to be able to finish, he kept me listening. I got shades of William S Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson when reading this. Its always been a bucket list read and I'm glad I did, but I can't really recommend it.

Now this, on the other hand, was an excellent read. Just a delightful story about the two lives of Patricia and how they were different by one simple change, to get married or not to get married. Its an alternate history story, but based primarily in her family and how they turn out and diverge. There are some peripheral information about the larger world about what is different than our world, primarily some limited nuclear conflicts. But the story stays with the family and with a common idea of memory and dementia that ultimately brings the two lives back together. An excellent read.

Listened to this on audio, read by Dominic Hoffman. If you read Huckleberry Finn, you know all about the adventures that Huck has with the runaway slave Jim. If you haven't (and I don't think I have ever actually read it fully), its okay, you don't need to. This book is essentially that story told from Jim's perspective. What prompts Jim to want to runaway, what happens on their way to free territory and what leads them back home. Its a really good read, with a very interesting perspective. Recommend.

This was an excellent, horror/not horror read. Its not horror in the traditional sense, but it is certainly horrific, gory and tense. A young couple with their adoptive daughter are on vacation when 4 strangers capture them and hold them hostage. They simply have to do one thing. Choose one of them and kill them, or the world is going to end. A very interesting premise and a good read.

DNF'd around page 90. I just wasn't connecting with the story and I had to put it down. The half star has nothing to do with the quality of the book, just an indication that I didn't finish it..

Listened on audio. What a beautiful little story this is. its been reviewed much better by others, specifically our friend Richard, so I won't belabor the point. But, briefly, John is a clergyman, come to a remote Scottish island to evict the last inhabitant so the island can be given over exclusively to sheep grazing. Ivar is that man. He speaks a lost language and when John arrives and is injured, Ivar nurses him back to health but they can't communicate. Ivar doesn't know why John's there and John comes to wonder why he's there too. The form an unusual friendship that comes to a head when John's wife Mary comes to the island to find her husband. Its a short book, but one well worth the time. This is the second of Davies' books I've read. I'll have to keep her on the watch list.

Read this as a shared read this month. It was a reread for me, I first read it sometime in my college years. My memory is that its was the first "literature" that I read without being told I had to read it. I liked it then, but I had no memory of reading it, as I read it now. Maugham is the narrator and he is describing the lives of his friends right after WWI, their family struggles, their financial struggles during the Great Depression. A lot of it is focused on Larry and his disillusionment with life and his search for meaning. A large section is Maugham's conversation with Larry about his time in India with Buddhist monks and his spiritual awakening. Its interesting, it seems that this section is the whole reason and point of the book (otherwise its just "Friends" in the Roaring 20's :) ), but Maugham makes a point that the reader can skip this whole section if they wanted to. I enjoyed this read quite a lot and I'm glad the group picked it as a group read.

Quotes:
"You make me tired. Do you think I sacrificed myself to let Larry fall into the hands of a raging nymphomaniac?" "How did you sacrifice yourself?" "I gave Larry up for the one and only reason that I didn't want to stand in his way." "Come off it, Isabel. You gave him up for a square-cut diamond and a sable coat."

One day I said to him: "You, who are so liberal, who know the world, who've read so much, science, philosophy, literature - do you in your heart of hearts believe in reincarnation?" His whole face show more changed. It became the face of a visionary. "My dear friend," he said, "if I didn't believe in it life would have no meaning for me.", "And do you believe in it, Larry?" I asked. "that's a very difficult question to answer. I don't think its possible for us Occidentals to believe in it as implicitly as these Orientals do. It's in their blood and bones. With us it can only be an opinion. I neither believe in it nor disbelieve in it." show less

Read on audio. After seeing the trailer for the new Wicked movie coming out, I thought I'd pick this up for a reread. Its a good take on what the lives of the Witches of Oz (North, East and West) were like before what we know from the original. I had forgotten how much this overlaps with Dorothy and the original Wizard of Oz. Its a very good read. I'll probably get to the other 3 in the series, eventually.

Thanks RD for the suggestion on this one. This is a novella that King wrote specifically for Amazon and the Kindle. Its essentially a scifi story set specifically in the Dark Tower universe (but I guess more generally its just Stephen's universe). Wesley is an English professor who, after a break up with his girlfriend ("Why don't you read off a computer like the rest of us"), decides to join the fray and buys one of these new fangled Kindle machines. But he doesn't get a normal one somehow. It has a secret menu that allows him to download books from famous authors from other universes; Poe wrote novels? Hemingway wrote a book about his dog? Shakespeare plays you've never heard of. For a bibliophile, the draw is intoxicating. But then in the best King way, the twist happens. He tells a couple friends about this device, and as they are exploring, they find a area that gives them news of these other worlds, not just books. It then becomes an issue of can you change time, and if you do, who's going to notice? First I thought it was a little ironic reading a story about a mysterious kindle ON a kindle, but that's the world we live in. I thought it was an excellent read and it makes me want to go back and reread some of the other interconnected works in the Dark Tower world (not so much the main series, I've read that enough, but the others that I've only read once way back in the day).

Listened on audio. This was one of the weirdest, tense books I've ever read. The premise is a bit of a stretch, but if you suspend your disbelief a bit its a pretty good read (especially on audio). The basic story is that Jay has had a troubled relationship with his father, who taught him about the sea and how to scuba dive. The father has recently died in the ocean off Monterey Bay and his body was never recovered. Jay takes it upon himself to dive to find the body. During the dive, thru circumstances I won't reveal here. Jay gets swallowed by a sperm whale. He survives being ingested, but only has the amount of air remaining in his tanks to figure out how to get out. Then the claustrophobic fun kicks off with the all too real descriptions of what its like being inside a whale and the lengths he goes thru to get out. I never realized listening to the book, until I just now typed out his name : Jay. or is it "J" for Jonah? A little too on the nose, hmmm? Kraus goes back and forth between whale time and the past to flesh out Jay's life and struggles with his overbearing dad. An interesting tension builder is that each chapter in the whale is how much PSI/Oxygen is left in the tank. It pretty much is a horror novel, so if you're into that, or just weird novels in general. I recommend it.

A short but very excellent collection of what I would term Fractured Fairy Tales. The essential stories we grew up on, just from a slightly different perspective and a little bit more real. "Crazy Old Lady" tells the story of Hansel and Gretel from the Witch's perspective, "Little Man" from Rumpelstiltskin's. "Her Hair" is the somewhat horrific aftermath of Rapunzel. A worth while read.

Quotes:
"Jacked" - Fair tales are generally moral tales. In the bleaker version of this one, mother and son both starve to death. That lesson would be: Mothers, try to be realistic about your imbecilic sons, no matter how charming their sly little grins, no matter how heartbreaking the dark-gold tousle of their hair. If you romanticize them, if you insist on virtues they clearly lack, if you persist in your blind desire to have raised a wise child, one who'll be helpful in your old age... don't be surprised if you find that you've fallen on the bathroom floor, and end up spending the night there, because he's out drinking with his friends until dawn.

"Steadfast; Tin" - They Stay married...because the marriage isn't all that bad, because getting unmarried seems so difficult, so frightening, so sad. They can separate after the kitchen is finished; after the kids are a little older; after they as a couple have finally passed through the realm of irritation and bickering, and reached the frozen waste of the unbearable.

Listened on audio. An excellent collection of sci-fi and near scifi stories. Many award winning and award nominated. Including the title story; which won the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. Good Hunting, a story that mixes Chinese mythology with modern times was adapted in Netflix's Love, Death and Robots animated series.

In an age where the modder culture reigns supreme in a post scarcity world, its possible for people to walkaway from the "Default" world and live outside of the corporate/commercial driven life the world has become. The Default world doesn't like that and pushes back. This is another story (Rapture of the Nerds was another one), where Docotorow explores the "singularity", is it possible and what happens when you do, when you can completely walk away, and upload your conscience to the cloud. And a very interesting take here, once you're in the cloud, what's to prevent you from being copied so there are now multiples of you in the cloud. An interesting story. If you're into his stuff, it's probably a good one to pick up.
That's why you never hear politicians talking about "citizens", it's all "taxpayers", as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care.

Quotes:
Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you're thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.

The internal politics of the Redwater family are always and only about one thing. "Money". "Power. Money's just keeping score"

The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

This is a excellent story about a world that is an extrapolation, I think, of the prison industrial complex and our reality TV obsessed populous. Shades of the Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Running Man and the Roman Gladiators, hardened criminals have the option to sign onto the CAPE program where they are put into Chain Gangs (teams) where the members have to fight members of other Chains to the death. If they survive 3 years, then they will win their release. Loretta Thurwar is coming up to her final match. And the book is a series of vignettes about her story, her "teammates", the competition and the protestors who appose this barbaric event. Very gritty and brutal, but an excellent story.

Read on audio. A very popular book that was getting all the buzz in the last year, as well as a series on Apple. Set in the late 50's, Elizabeth Zott is a highly intelligent woman, who has to deal with the misogyny of the times. She's expelled from a doctoral program because she was a victim of assault by her advisor, she gets a lab tech job, but when her famous chemist boyfriend passes away, she's fired as being because she's going to be an unwed mother. Through circumstances she becomes a famous host of a cooking show, despite all the push backs of her male superiors. And in the end, because it makes perfect sense 😁, she leaves her cooking show to go back triumphantly to her life as a research chemist and all is figuratively right with the world. A very good read.

A free kindle read from Amazon's First Reads program. A short story about a group of elderly women friends meet weekly to reminisce on their lives. During these gatherings, they plot to get revenge on the group of writers to ruined the career of one of their friends. They find it's easy to talk about devious plans, but its harder and has unintended consequences when you act on them. Pretty decent story.

Read on Audio. Alan Clay is struggling salesman coming to the end of his career trying land that one big deal. He travels to Saudi Arabia to sell IT infrastructure to the King for his new business city being built in the middle of the desert. Part of the sales pitch is to show of the company's new holographic conferencing system (this seems pretty cool, but it was written in 2012 before the era of Zoom that we now live in :) ). He and his team go to this tent every day to wait for the King's arrival, no one knows when or if he'll show. Its kind of a Waiting for Godot sort of thing. While he's waiting, we just get a kind of meditation on his life and where things have gone off the rails. It was a pretty good, quick read.

Read this on audio. This was a very interesting book in both premise and writing style. The premise is that Thelonious Ellison, an African American Professor of English Literature and novelist, is struggling with his career, and his family (especially with his Mother, who is starting to succumb to dementia. He writes "literature" and can't get his books published anymore because he isn't "black enough". After a first time author writes a stereotypical urban novel and it gains wide success, he sort of snaps and writes what in his mind is a satirical response to her book, pretending to be a black convict writing about his experiences. He calls it My Pafology and after publishers climb all over themselves to get it, he renames it Fuck. And its still an unexpected/amazing (to him) runaway success. The interesting stylistic take is that its a book within a book. The middle part is the reading of My Pafology. Such an interesting wide shift in tone and dialog, as expected. A really good read. Its been made into a movie called American Fiction staring Jeffrey Wright.

Listened to this on audio. This was a very interesting take on the crime thriller. We already know who did it, he's on death row for killing several young girls back in the day. Today is is last day and we watch the him has he goes thru his day on his way to the execution chamber. Intercut with this we go back in time to meet the women in his life, those who raised him, those he killed and those who caught him. What's absent, to good effect, is all the violence of the actual crimes. We know he did it, we don't have to "see" it, we just get to meet and understand the people around him. A good quick read.