The Verge Book Club - Audio

The Verge Book Club took a tour on the noir side in December, by reading one of the all-time classics in the genre: Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. The novel, which introduces readers to detective Philip Marlowe, sparked immediate Book Club debate over a range of topics — from whether Chandler depicts women as furniture or wild animals, to whether The Big Sleep's enduring legacy is deserved or not.

The Circle was a controversial, exciting, and interesting pick for November's Book Club book, so we had plenty to talk about. Topics covered include what Eggers gets wrong, what he gets right, and why this book, despite its numerous problems, overall lack of deep exploration of its interesting themes, and lack of sufficiently tolerable characters, is so readable.

Laura June, Adi Robertson, and Katie Drummond get together to discuss Stephen King's newest novel, 'Doctor Sleep,' a sequel to 1977's massive hit 'The Shining.' Join them for the full, spooky hour.

September's book club was Ship Breaker, a young adult novel set in a world ravaged by the effects of global warming. It's a fast-paced, thoughtful story about family, environmental disaster, and parasailing clipper ships. A month later, Adi and Laura sat down with the book's author Paolo Bacigalupi. Among other things, Bacigalupi is known for The Windup Girl, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel in 2009 and was named one of the top ten fiction books of the year by Time magazine.

Join Joshua Topolsky, Adi Robertson, and Laura June as they discuss William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer.

April's Book Club book was Michael Chabon's 1998, Nebula award-winning The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Verge editors Adi Robertson and Laura June are joined this month by Jesse Cohen of the band Tanlines, who also worked for several years at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Join us for the hour while we discuss this gripping and sometimes challenging book. Enjoy!

March is long gone, but H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness looms large in our hearts. For one hour (or possibly, one aeon), join Joshua Topolsky, Adi Robertson, and Laura June as they discuss Lovecraft's hatred of penguins and much, much more. Don't forget to join us for April's book, Michael Chabon' The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

January's Book Club Book was the extraordinary Alif the Unseen, a 2012 New York Times Notable book by G. Willow Wilson. This month, Adi and Laura are joined by Wilson herself to discuss the book.

In the real world — Planet Earth, reality — there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; those people have more money than all the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of those have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyways, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City. That's why the place is so overdeveloped. Hold a Book Club Vergecast on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.

October has come and gone, and The Verge Book Club has moved on to Inverted World. Before you get too enthralled in Christopher Priest's classic, however, we invite you to take a moment to reflect on Foucault's Pendulum.

This September was the first month of The Verge Book Club, and if you've been reading along, you already know that we read Philip K. Dick's rather mind-bending novel, Ubik. Here is our companion Vergecast, wherein we answer every question and solve every riddle that has ever puzzled any reader ever about the book... If only it were so simple. Join Joshua Topolsky, Laura June and special guest Lev Grossman as they discuss the book and Philip K. Dick the man for approximately one hour, and don't forget to join us for the October book, Foucault's Pendulum. Warning: There are spoilers!