Book Qlub 6

For Book Qlub 6 we met up at The Sycamore over on Mission Street. It was chilly, and the yummy French fries ran out, but there was beers and conversations, so it was a success! Yesssss!

We had many great discussions on the short stories we read out of the Brave New Worlds dystopian collection edited by John Joseph Adams. We covered a good foundation of dark and heavy stories, most of us agreeing that while they were awesome, one could only read so many in one sitting. Some of them ("O, Happy Day!", "Pop Squad") were quite intense, but great!

We had a long discussion of Shirley Jackson's classic "The Lottery." For many of us the signifigance and point of the story seemed pretty maleable. Here's what Jackson said about her own story in the SF Chronicle (July 22, 1948):

"Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery

At any rate, there were so many good stories that we didn't get to (it's a pretty big collection) that we went ahead and decieded to split the stories in half and read the latter for Book Qlub 6.5.