What we’re about
A book club to scratch that sweet spot inside your head. Reading books that will gnaw their way into your brain and then eat it out from the inside out. Books that aren't afraid to imagine radical new possibilities for both you and the rest of the world. Books that question themselves and everything else. Books that make strange noises and funny little beeps. Books that refuse to offer easy answers and instead invite you to... go a little bit deeper.
Conversations that get beneath the surface and beyond the superficial to examine the various beautiful and mysterious ways that books can challenge and shape our perspectives and ideologies in ways that enrich and inspire us further. Making us into better humans or maybe even something better than human?
Peeking into the minds of such authors as: Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K Dick, Stanisław Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, Margaret Atwood, Alasdair Gray, Octavia E. Butler, Michel Houellebecq, China Miéville, Becky Chambers, Vladimir Nabokov, qntm, Haruki Murakami, H. P. Lovecraft, Jeff VanderMeer, Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Virginia Woolf, Susanna Clarke, Iain M Banks, Gene Wolfe, Sally Rooney, J. G. Ballard and many more
Join us.
Upcoming events
4
Brain Worms 112 / Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, Dalston, Hackney, GBCharlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence – a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.
Available from all good libraries and book shops.
You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.
We will be meeting in The Ludski Bar in the Rio Cinema.
https://www.riocinema.org.uk/your-visit/
You are welcome to bring outside food in with you but please buy your drinks from inside the cinema. Thank you.
We hope to see you there.
...
To join the Brain Worms WhatsApp Group please click here: https://chat.whatsapp.com/EvFibn1d6AsEwdVGmwkhko (in order to stop spam bots this will take you to a Waiting Room. Once in please write your name and we will join you to the main chat).
Meetup charges subscription fees. If you would like to make a donation please click here: https://paypal.me/philosophycollective32 attendees
Brain Worms 113 / Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, Dalston, Hackney, GBArea X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.
Available from all good libraries and book shops.
You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.
We will be meeting in The Ludski Bar in the Rio Cinema.
https://www.riocinema.org.uk/your-visit/
You are welcome to bring outside food in with you but please buy your drinks from inside the cinema. Thank you.
We hope to see you there.
...
To join the Brain Worms WhatsApp Group please click here: https://chat.whatsapp.com/EvFibn1d6AsEwdVGmwkhko (in order to stop spam bots this will take you to a Waiting Room. Once in please write your name and we will join you to the main chat).
Meetup charges subscription fees. If you would like to make a donation please click here: https://paypal.me/philosophycollective9 attendees
Brain Worms 114 / Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka
Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, Dalston, Hackney, GBIn the bizarre world of Franz Kafka, salesmen turn into giant bugs, apes give lectures at college academies, and nightmares probe the mysteries of modern humanity’s unhappiness. More than any other modern writer in world literature, Kafka captures the loneliness and misery that fill the lives of 20th-century humanity. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories reveals the author’s extraordinary talent in a variety of forms—prose poems, short stories, sketches, allegories, and novelettes—and showcases the straight–faced humour, startling psychological insight, and haunting imagination for which he is revered as a modern master.
We will be reading the Penguin edition of Metamorphosis and Other Stories which contains the following stories:
Contemplation (1913)
Children on the Road
Unmasking a Confidence Trickster
The Sudden Walk
Resolutions
The Excursion into the Mountains
The Plight of the Bachelor
The Businessman
Looking out Distractedly
The Way Home
The Men Running Past
The Passenger
Dresses
The Rejection
For the Consideration of Amateur Jockeys
The Window on to the Street
Desire to be a Red Indian
The Trees
Being Unhappy
The Judgement: A Story for F. (1913)
The Stoker: A Fragment (1913)
Metamorphosis (1913)
In the Penal Colony (1919)
A Country Doctor: Short Prose for my Father (1920)
The New Advocate
A Country Doctor
In the Gallery
An Old Journal
Before the Law
Jackals and Arabs
A Visit to the Mine
The Neighbouring Village
A Message from the Emperor
The Worries of a Head of Household
Eleven Sons
A Fratricide
A Dream
A Report to an Academy
A Hunger-Artist: Four Stories (1924)
First Sorrow
A Little Woman
A Hunger-Artist
Josefine, the Singer, or The Mouse People
Appendix
Aeroplanes in Brescia (1909)
Great Noise (1912)
The Coal-Scuttle Rider (1921)
Available from all good libraries and book shops.
You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.
We will be meeting in The Ludski Bar in the Rio Cinema.
https://www.riocinema.org.uk/your-visit/
You are welcome to bring outside food in with you but please buy your drinks from inside the cinema. Thank you.
We hope to see you there.
...
To join the Brain Worms WhatsApp Group please click here: https://chat.whatsapp.com/EvFibn1d6AsEwdVGmwkhko (in order to stop spam bots this will take you to a Waiting Room. Once in please write your name and we will join you to the main chat).
Meetup charges subscription fees. If you would like to make a donation please click here: https://paypal.me/philosophycollective7 attendees
Brain Worms 115 / There Is No Antimemetics Division (2025) by qntm
Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, Dalston, Hackney, GBAn antimeme is an entity with self-censoring properties. Some are benign; but others, less so… These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you you – and you’ll never even know anything changed. And they aren’t just feeding on us. They’re invading. But how do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.
Available from all good libraries and book shops.
You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.
We will be meeting in The Ludski Bar in the Rio Cinema.
https://www.riocinema.org.uk/your-visit/
You are welcome to bring outside food in with you but please buy your drinks from inside the cinema. Thank you.
We hope to see you there.
...
To join the Brain Worms WhatsApp Group please click here: https://chat.whatsapp.com/EvFibn1d6AsEwdVGmwkhko (in order to stop spam bots this will take you to a Waiting Room. Once in please write your name and we will join you to the main chat).
Meetup charges subscription fees. If you would like to make a donation please click here: https://paypal.me/philosophycollective4 attendees
Past events
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