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 "Bellwether" by Connie Willis:

Pop culture, chaos theory, and matters of the heart collide in this unique novella from the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of Doomsday Book. Sandra Foster studies fads and their meanings for the HiTek corporation. Bennett O'Reilly works with monkey-group behavior and chaos theory for the same company. When the two are thrust together due to a misdelivered package and a run of seemingly bad luck, they find a joint project in a flock of sheep. But a series of setbacks and disappointments arise before they are able to find answers to their questions-with the unintended help of the errant, forgetful, and careless office assistant Flip.

A limited number of print copies of the selected book are available at Central Library's Floor Info Desk on the 2nd floor on a first-come, first-served basis. We also encourage you to place holds on available print or digital copies.

**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 "Monday Starts on Saturday" by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky:

When young programmer Aleksandr Ivanovich Privalov picks up two hitchhikers while driving in Karelia, he is drawn into the mysterious world of the Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry, where research into magic is serious business. Where science, sorcery and socialism meet, can chaos be far behind?

**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.