So I know we have the biweekly "what are you reading" thread, but sometimes a book will stick with you for a while beyond reading it. I'm curious what those sticky books might be for those who would like to share. Feel free to include an honorable mention if you wish!

For example, I finished reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones pretty recently, and I have a feeling it's going to stick with me for a while. It has a particularly unique flavor of an often-seen paranormal/mythological creature that I appreciated, and the characters developed so much over time that I find myself thinking about it. This book wasn't at all like what I normally read (though I am trying to branch out) and I benefitted from the reading experience more than I expected to. The blurb I got for the book also tells you nothing about the story - it's basically just the hook - and I think that technique worked very well. Interestingly, most of the books I find myself thinking about for a while after I read them are horror books, but I'm not usually thinking about them for their scarier elements.

Honorable mention - Sand by Hugh Howey. I read this a year ago and often find myself recommending it to people who enjoy sci fi. I found the technology (decrepit though it is shown to be) super interesting.

Other books that are feeling memorable for me right now are part of series I'm actively working toward finishing, so I'm not really counting those, as they're called up by their universes every time I dive back in.

Edit - Nominations are closed

This is the fourth nominations thread for Tildes book club.

If you think you might be interested to read with us, please name between one and five books you find intriguing and think others might enjoy. We will later have a voting thread so that each nomination gets an equal shot to win votes with no early nomination advantage. Our next book in August is Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Followed by Ted Chiang Stories of your life and Others in September.

Please feel free to nominate both fiction and nonfiction. Books should be 600 pages or shorter. The first books in series are fair game for nominations if they tell a complete story.

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.

I've never really been one to look into publishers too much, with the extent of my interaction being that if I noticed they published some books I enjoyed I may go and look up what other authors they've published to see if I'd also enjoy their books.

Are there any publishers you actively follow or subscribe to any newsletters for, or engage with in any way?

I thought it might be fun seeing how my fellow Tilders interact with publishers.

I've been re-reading the Discworld books recently and there are so many quotes that jump out at me as forming who I was as a child, or particularly relevant in 2025.

I'm interested in everyone's favourite Sir Pterry quote, if you have one!

I've always been a big fan of going to a second hand book store/thrift store and searching around for some cheap books to add to my bookshelf. When I was younger, it helped me get more bang for my buck, and growing up in the greater Portland Oregon area, I had access to Powell's Books which was an amazing place to go and see how many books I could get for $10-20 when my parents would take me.

I don't get to shop for books often as I made a foolish (joking) agreement with my wife that I would read all of the books I own before buying new ones, but when I do, I love that sense of going into a used book store/thrift shop and seeing what I might find.

I tend to try and complete series that I'm missing books in or that I know are on my to read list and will often pull out my phone to check. But when I was last browsing through the used book stores near the market my family goes to, it got me wondering how other people search go thrifting for books and I thought up a few questions below

Do you:

• judge books by their cover?
• have a list of books you search for?
• set a spending limit and see what you can get?
• go with family or friends, or is it a solo venture?
• frequent the same shops or try to cast a wide net?
• use online sites to purchase your second hand books?
• have any fun stories you'd want to share?

If you have other thoughts on buying books second hand, feel free to share them!

User and book club ping recipient Maevens said that it would help them if the book and questions were posted to Storygraph, so I created a basic book club template, but I haven't done anything with it yet.

What do you all think? Options include simply posting the book title each month, posting the book title and the discussion questions each month or posting and including a link to the Tildes book club discussion. I'm going to do something minimal regardless, to honor Maevens' request but I want to know what you all think and whether there are things you specifically don't want me to do.

Bottom line, the two book clubs could run in parallel with crossover and links, or they could be essentially separate. Please advise.

Don't think of "rules" in the question as necessarily a hard-and-fast thing (though it certainly can be if you work that way!). It can be interpreted as "guidelines" or "parameters" or "workflow" or whatnot.

I'm interested in learning about what guides your reading habits and choices. Stuff like:

• How do you choose what to read next?
• Do you read one book at a time or jump between multiple titles?
• How/why do you choose between physical/ebook/audiobook for a given title?
• How do you decide to stop reading a book you don't like (if at all)?
• Do you have a specific "spot" for reading?
• Do you have any particular reading rituals?
• When do you decide whether a book is worth a re-read?
• Do you track/rate your books?
• How much do you learn about a book before you read it?
• How do you manage your "TBR" (to be read) list (if at all)?
• etc.

Don't think of this as a survey where you have to answer each question, but more that those questions are all trying to get at the idea that I want to hear about the decisions you make about reading itself. Anything and everything you feel is relevant is fair game!

(Inspired by some discussion over at the The New Lifetime Reading Plan topic)

Which authors or texts do you feel deserve a place in the literary canon, but don't currently have one?

There is, of course, not one singular, well-defined "canon" -- so interpret "the canon" as "the classics" or "required reading" or "most important works of literature" or however else you care to define it.

In particular, consider areas that the canon tends to overlook: female authors, eastern perspectives, plays (besides Shakespeare's works), etc.

The flip can be from widely liked to widely disliked, or it can go the opposite direction.

Also, it doesn’t have to be based solely on the book itself (though it certainly can be).

• Maybe the actions of the author changed the perception of the book.
• Maybe a bad sequel tanked the esteem of the original story in hindsight.
• Maybe cultural changes now cast the book in a different light.
• etc.

Whatever the case: what’s a book where opinion has flipped, and why do you think people’s opinions changed?

The time loop topic has a few entries of media where the time loop is a twist/spoiler, and made me think of how hard it is to recommend books/media where the reveal is part of what makes it impactful.

Two I can think of off the top of my head are

• The Girl with all the Gifts by Mike Carey

• We are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Very different genres and topics and I can't at all think of how to describe either one without spoiling it.

This question is inspired by two things:

1. @carsonc’s comment in the hard sci-fi topic about Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars starting off in 2026 (which is right around the corner).

2. I started reading Ministry for the Future (coincidentally also by Kim Stanley Robinson) for the Tildes Book Club, and the titular organization starts in, of all times, January 2025 (as in, right now! The book was a perfect pick for this month).

It got me thinking about how a lot of science and speculative fiction books from the past imagined a future ahead of themselves, and how the passage of time has brought us to or even past those imagined futures.

So I’m interested in specific date milestones from fiction that we have met or passed already. They do not have to specifically be from science/speculative fiction, though I imagine most will be.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby celebrates its 100th anniversary this month.

It got me thinking: what are the books from our time that you think might be widely read/taught a century from now? What do you think will give them that kind of staying power?

No hard limits on what counts as “contemporary” by the way. An easy cutoff would be anything released in 2000 and on, but if there are books from before then that you have strong feelings about, by all means share them!

I've been thinking about this question lately. We have so many options for consuming literature these days - checking something out from the library, listening to it on your platform of choice, etc. Many options don't require spending money specifically on that item (for example, if you use the library, Kindle Unlimited, or other options where you might pay for a subscription but not for a particular item).

For me, because of this abundance of choice in consumption for free, I've started to feel a bit paralyzed by decision fatigue when trying to decide if I want to purchase a book - either physical or digital. Digital is easier to make a final call on - I'll check the library. If they don't have it, I may or may not buy it in digital form, depending on how compelled I am by reviews or peer pressure. Recently, I've been snagging anything interesting-looking that is available for free on Kindle, so my digital purchasing might increase in the future, or I might subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.

But physical? Recently, physical books have come to mean a couple of things to me: first, clutter. I am less likely to accept even a free book because we don't have room to hang onto something I'm not actively invested in. We have two bookshelves and they're both full. Second, owning (and keeping) a physical book says that it's special to me in some manner - I either really like it or wanted to support the author or both. When I do buy a physical book, I try to buy from a local bookstore (though I'm not amazing at this yet). I just preordered two books after maybe a month of debating and comparing purchasing avenues. (Meanwhile, I purchased a set of 8 children's books at 6 am yesterday because I dreamed about a character from them... so my decisions aren't always rational!)

What are your criteria for buying books? Feel free to share how you make your decisions for any format - and also anything about your personal setup that might make decisions for you!

This thread is an opportunity to vote between a couple of options I see for our spring schedule based on the votes received in the two voting threads.

Please vote for one of them by upvoting. If anyone wants to propose an alternative reasonable set of books based on the numbers in the voting thread, for the consideration of the group, please feel free.

Our next discussion will be the City We Became and we will be discussing in early December.

It is time to vote for our minority and disadvantaged perspective books for the next book list.

Please vote for only two books this time after Deimos adds the books as comments.

Thanks for reading with us. I look forward to discovering some great books with you this year.

This is a first attempt at a nomination thread for books targeting this group's stated desire to read books representing minority, or diverse or disadvantaged perspectives and experiences.

I'm drawing the boundaries of the category as broadly as I can and feel free to include a book (within the length limit of 600 pages) that you think fits within these parameters. Also, diverse or minority or disadvantaged can apply to either or both of author or main character.

Here is my attempt to find examples of what we might choose. This is not meant to be a set of hard boundaries, just a descriptive exploration.

Books that qualify include but are not limited to: being from a poor or formerly colonized country, being an immigrant or refugee, being a political/ethnic minority such as basque, tibetan, romani or catalan or kurdish, being indigenous, being poor or ethnic minority in a dominant country, being a sexual/gender minority, being disabled etc.

It's time to vote. This thread is for voting on the next set of books for book club. Voting will close end of day Sunday.

If you would like to read with us, please upvote as many as five titles. We will select at least four, probably more if there are books with solid support. I look forward to reading and discussing with you all.

There are a few people who voted before the thread was complete so books with authors earlier in the alphabet got a slight statistical advantage. I will take lessons for next time to avoid this.

So I have been reflecting on the statements of many members of this book reading group that they want to include books from diverse perspectives. Talking about next year and looking at our current voting results, I see three options and I would like us to vote on which the group prefers.

First, we could accept a very long list from this voting thread and cut off choices just after Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. That would delay new nominations for over a year.

Second, we could elevate Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and possibly Demon Copperhead to the top of the list in a sort of affirmative action.

Third, we could agree that our next nomination thread (for a smaller list of books) would exclusively be taken from groups that are disadvantaged in some way. An incomplete list of such disadvantage would include being from a poor or formerly colonized country, being an immigrant or refugee, being a political/ethnic minority such as basque, romani or catalan or kurdish, being indigenous, being poor or ethnic minority in a dominant country, being a sexual/gender minority, being disabled etc.

This is the third nominations thread for Tildes book club.

If you think you might be interested to read with us, please name between one and five books you find intriguing and think others might enjoy. We will later have a voting thread so that each nomination gets an equal shot to win votes with no early nomination advantage. After we finish discussing Kindred this month and the City We Became at the end of November, we will move on to read the new titles.

Please feel free to nominate both fiction and nonfiction and consider nominating a diverse selection of books and authors. Books should be 600 pages or shorter. The first books in series are fair game for nominations if they tell a complete story.

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.