Notes on Our Late-June 2026 Meetup, and Nominees for Our August Monthly Pick (Short Reads) [Updated]
Hey there, fellow bookworms 👋🏼, here’s the latest from our club…
Late-June 2026 Meetup
In yesterday’s meetup we discussed Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know and found it to be rather demanding. Unlike our previous novels, this one is not something you might want to keep on your bedside table for nightly reading sessions. Its cast of characters and plot are rather complex, and McEwan uses a very broad vocabulary (quail with ceps, anyone?). Even though the story itself captivates us, the steep learning curve makes for a comparatively slow reading experience.
We also had a closer look at Ted Chiang’s The Great Silence and were pretty impressed by the broad range of philosophical questions it poses: Why do we go to such lengths to search the universe for intelligent life while also failing to pay attention to (or show respect for) life on Earth? Is mankind the pinnacle of intelligence? Can animals be smarter than we think? Can they outsmart us without us even realizing this? It’s a short read that raises a lot of questions—and we enjoyed it.
Nominees For Our August Monthly Pick (Short Reads)
What else? We discussed some of the reading suggestions we’ve recently collected through our app (e.g. Burial Rites [Hannah Kent], The Correspondent [Virginia Evans], Atonement [Ian McEwan]), as well as our current nominees (short reads) for our August Monthly Pick:
- Harrison Bergeron (Kurt Vonnegut),
- The Answer Is No (Fredrik Backman),
- The Paper Menagerie (Ken Liu).
We’re excited to see which nominee will become our August Monthly Pick. The nomination deadline is today, and the winner will be announced after August 3.
Update August 4, 2026
Fredrik Backman’s The Answer Is No has been voted our Monthly Pick for August 2026.
