Brain Worms Book Club

Written in a deceptively simple, almost laconic style Borges takes us inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father’s “killer,” and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.

We will be reading the Penguin edition of The Aleph and Other Stories which contains the following stories:

"The Immortal" ("El inmortal")
"The Dead Man" ("El Muerto")
"The Theologians" ("Los teólogos")
"Story of the Warrior and the Captive" ("Historia del guerrero y la cautiva")
"Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz" ("Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874)")
"Emma Zunz"
"The House of Asterion" ("La casa de Asterión")
"The Other Death" ("La otra muerte")
"Deutsches Requiem" ("Deutsches réquiem")
"Averroes's Search" ("La busca de Averroes")
"The Zahir" ("El zahir")
"The Writing of the God" ("La escritura del dios")
"Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth" ("Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto")
"The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths" ("Una leyenda arábiga" ("Historia de los dos reyes y los dos laberintos, como nota de Burton") ) "The Wait" ("La espera")
"The Man on the Threshold" ("El hombre en el umbral")
"The Aleph" ("El Aleph")

Available from all good libraries and book shops.

You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.

J.G. Ballard's mesmerizing and ferociously prescient novel imagines a terrifying future in which solar radiation and global warming have melted the polar ice caps and Triassic-era jungles have overrun a submerged and tropical London. Set during the year 2145, the novel follows biologist Dr. Robert Kerans and his team of scientists as they confront a surreal cityscape populated by giant iguanas, albino alligators, and endless swarms of malarial insects. Nature has swallowed all but a few remnants of human civilization, and, slowly, Kerans and his companions are transformed—both physically and psychologically—by this prehistoric environment. A thrilling adventure and a haunting examination of the effects of environmental collapse on the human mind.

Available from all good libraries and book shops.

You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.

The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our sheared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory. The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.

Available from all good libraries and book shops.

You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.

When the spring came the people - what was left of them - moved back by the old paths from the sea. But this year strange things were happening, terrifying things that had never happened before. Inexplicable sounds and smells; new, unimaginable creatures half glimpsed through the leaves. What the people didn't, and perhaps never would, know, was that the day of their people was already over. From the author of Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors is a startling recreation of the lost world of the Neanderthals, and a frightening vision of the beginning of a new age.

Available from all good libraries and book shops.

You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.