The Austin Books and Chatter Group

We have changed the June book from the Wrong Box to People Like Us by Jason Mott. We will read the Wrong Box in July. Jason Mott’s novel People Like Us is not a memoir, yet it has deeply personal connections to Jason’s life — a sequel to his National Book Award-winning novel, Hell of a Book. And while rooted in reality, it explodes with dreamlike experiences from the ability to time travel to sightings of sea monsters and peacocks, and feelings of love and memory so real they hurt.

We have changed this from June to July. Let's get together to read this very short and very funny novella.
"The Wrong Box" by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne is a black comedy novel published in 1889. Two elderly brothers are the last survivors of a tontine—a financial scheme where the final survivor claims everything. When one brother appears to have died in a train crash, his nephews desperately attempt to conceal a body to protect their inheritance. Meanwhile, a corpse gets shipped in the wrong container, triggering a farcical chain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Box_(novel)#:~:text=The%20Wrong%20Box%20is%20a,surviving%20members%20of%20a%20tontine.

The full text of the novella
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1585

Audiobook
https://librivox.org/the-wrong-box-by-robert-louis-stevenson-and-lloyd-osbourne/

Non-Fiction. 2024.
Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade
"Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston's rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors-the last documented survivors of any slave ship-whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways"

Bicycling with Butterlies: My 10,201 Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration. Nature researcher and educator Dykman had been bicycle touring for over a decade when she hatched her most ambitious plan: to ride over 10,000 miles across North America, following the annual migration of the monarch butterfly.