Gift link for @oldmom4896 article
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/books/review/woody-brown-upward-bound.html
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I’m halfway through Upward Bound and just started this morning! It’s good. Unusual, authentic, thought provoking. Recommended!
From the Guardian interview: “One of the reasons I wanted to be a great writer was that I wanted neurotypical people to read my book, not out of pity but because it was a good book.”
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I just finally read (listened to) Station Eleven. I had never found descriptions of it compelling and it was one of my D22’s favorite books in high school so I figured it appealed to a younger audience but I really liked it. I had some issues with the world building but I thought it was really good if you missed it previously!
For non-fiction fans I really enjoyed Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris about bicycling the Silk Road - nice change from my usual science/history reading.
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I rarely read science fiction, but I read Station Eleven because a friend recommended it. I thought it was great and chose it for my book club.(The person who hosts book club gets to pick the book for that meeting.) I have not watched the tv series.
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I just finished listening to three books: Beyond That, the Sea; The Dream Hotel; and Tilt and liked all of them. Tilt and The Dream Hotel were maybe not the easiest listens but very gripping and Beyond That, the Sea was a really lovely listen (I think this is one where the audiobook experience enhances the book!)
Currently finishing up reading The God of the Woods and Project Hail Mary, both of which I’m really loving.
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I’ve enjoyed all her books - that was one of the last ones I read, and it was just totally different to what I was expecting. I love it when books go in different directions than it seems like they will!
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Jenna Bush picked this as her book club book for this month. She had a story about the author and his mother, and couldn’t stop gushing about how much she liked the book.
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I read a lot of sci fi and read Station Eleven shortly after it came out. It was weird. I never quite believed in the world she created and I thought the traveling theater troupe seemed more like an elaborate metaphor than anything that would actually happen. The pandemic part though, when Covid hit, I was very glad that we didn’t lose our whole infrastructure like they did!
Funny it never occurred to me that Station Eleven was science fiction. I mean there’s not really any science in it.
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Maybe speculative fiction would be more accurate.
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Dystopian fiction?
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Wikipedia calls the Station 11 streaming show an American post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction television miniseries
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Yeah I’m not sure what a strict definition of sci-fi is. Some people need it to refer to “science”, and to others it just means “something set in the future”. I’m not sure if there is a generational difference. I don’t remember anything being referred to as “dystopian fiction” when I was growing up, and example the Handmaid’s Tale i would say is more dystopian than “science” but as I recall it won a significant sci fi prize of some sort at the time?
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yea… and to add to my confusion is “fantasy” categories
I looked it up and the novel 1984, written in the late 1940’s, is classified as science fiction. Dystopian fiction is considered a subgenre of science fiction.
My latest annoyance is the merging of genres to make up new genre names - dramady, romantasy, sporror (fungus related horror), etc.
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I looked it up too and apparently being set in the future is enough to make it considered science fiction even without science (and without magic - with magic it’s fantasy). Who knew?
(actually the fact that for 20 years there was no electricity was one of the things I didn’t buy. Even with only 1% of the population left that’s still 70,000,000 people worldwide. Surely there were some engineers among that number and there were libraries and books. But I guess we don’t actually know what’s happening outside of the small geographic area covered by the book. And I was still able to suspend my disbelief and buy that The Collapse destroyed a lot of infrastructure, as well as potentially carrying off a lot of the 1% that survived the flu so that the 70m number wasn’t actually accurate - it was much lower.).
Reading Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner. I only read hard back books at this time. That often means a long queue so was happy to see this on the shelf. Wild Dark Shore has 72 people waiting locally.
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There are two fairly recent books by this name on Amazon - which author ?
Only this came up: McConaghy, Charlotte
What is the other one?
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Mira Langston