Fort Collins Book Club

This month, we will be discussing Orbital: A Novel by Samantha Harvey

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.
Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.

DETAILS ABOUT OUR MEETING: We are starting at 6:00 PM for a general greetings and a potluck supper. The book discussion will begin at about 6:45 PM. At the conclusion of the discussion, we will elect the next Fiction book to discuss at the October 2025 meetup. The candidate books will be:

1. The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, by Robert Dugoni
2. Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng
3. Prophet Song: A Novel, by Paul Lynch

Hope to see you there!

This month we will be reading and discussing "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan.

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.

Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves.

Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.

Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.

DETAILS ABOUT OUR MEETING: We are starting at 6:00 PM for a general greetings and a potluck supper. The book discussion will begin at about 6:45 PM. At the conclusion of the discussion, we will elect the next Non-Fiction book to discuss at the November 2025 meetup. The candidate books will be:

1. I'll Push You: A Journey of 500 Miles, Two Best Friends, and One Wheelchair by Patrick Gray & Justin Skeesuck
2. Comet’s Tale by Steven D. Wolf
3. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahnerman, Oliver Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein

Hope to see you there.