Lit Up: Events with Literary Style

**Register on the Library's website to receive the Zoom link and passcode. A Zoom account is not required to join.**

This is a volunteer-led book club. We meet the third Wednesday evening of the month online via Zoom. New members are always welcome!

This month's selection is "Death of the Author" by Nnedi Okorafor:

Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister’s lavish Caribbean wedding, she’s unceremoniously fired from her university job and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop, she decides to write something just for herself. What comes out is nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It’s a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots. When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she does not realize she is about to embark on a life-altering journey—one that will catapult her into literary stardom, but also perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be. From Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, Zelu’s novel will change the future not only for humanity, but for the robots who come next.

**Register on the Library's website to receive the Zoom link and passcode. A Zoom account is not required to join.**

This is a volunteer-led book club. We meet the third Wednesday evening of the month online via Zoom. New members are always welcome!

This month's selection is "The Blighted Stars (The Devoured Worlds #1)" by Megan E. O'Keefe:

She's a revolutionary. Humanity is running out of options. Habitable planets are being destroyed as quickly as they're found, and Naira Sharp thinks she knows the reason why. The all-powerful Mercator family has been controlling the exploration of the universe for decades, and exploiting any materials they find along the way under the guise of helping humanity's expansion. But Naira knows the truth, and she plans to bring the whole family down from the inside. He's the heir to the dynasty. Tarquin Mercator never wanted to run a galaxy-spanning business empire. He just wanted to study geology and read books. But Tarquin's father has tasked him with monitoring the settlement of a new planet, and he doesn't really have a choice in the matter. Disguised as Tarquin's new bodyguard, Naira plans to destroy the settlement ship before they make land. But neither of them expects to end up stranded on a dead planet. To survive and keep her secret, Naira will have to join forces with the man she's sworn to hate. And together they will uncover a plot that's bigger than both of them.

**Register on the Library's website to receive the Zoom link and passcode. A Zoom account is not required to join.**

This is a volunteer-led book club. We meet the third Wednesday evening of the month online via Zoom. New members are always welcome!

This month's selection is "Kitty Cat Kill Sat: A Feline Space Adventure" by Argus:

Civilization has fallen. The solar system is blanketed with the automated weapons of ancient wars, engineered plagues, hazardous waste, rogue AI, monsters from outside our dimension, artificial disasters, and nuclear climate change. Every moment of life on Earth is a brutal fight for survival. The people of Sol carry on, but hope is at a premium. They need something more. Someone with a plan, a savior, a hero. What they get is Lily. Owner of the last functional battle station for the last four hundred years by right of being the last living soul on it, Lily ad-Alice has spent all that time struggling to save lives, fend off loneliness, and operate human-made weapons controls with paws and meows. Four centuries of establishing protocols, figuring out how to utilize an irresponsibly large arsenal of orbital weaponry, and scraping by with what life support still functions. Lily doesn’t have a plan. She can’t even tell how haunted her home is. Every day is an endless stream of alarms and crises—it’s a lot for a lone desperate housecat to handle herself. But being the proprietor of the last piece of working orbital infrastructure in existence is a responsibility and duty she’s accepted anyway.

Now things are changing again. Something big is looming, and everything Lily has scrambled for hundreds of years to achieve is at risk. But if she’s quick, maybe she can do some good. If she’s cunning, maybe she can adapt. If she’s smart, maybe she can build something that lasts this time. And if she’s very, very lucky, maybe she won’t have to do it alone.