Tonight on the GeekNights Book Club, we review and discuss Binti. Because it was short and also extremely good, we ended up reading and will be discussing the complete trilogy. Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.

The first in Nnedi Okorafor's trilogy, it won the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novella. You know if there's one thing GeekNights is into, it's space universities.

Tonight on the GeekNights Book Club, we review and discuss Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit. Far future calendar-fueled space battles abound, and we had a good time with it. It's book one of the Machineries of Empire series, and Rym is already well into the rest of it. We also announce that the next book club book will be Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti.

Tonight on the GeekNights Book Club, we review and discuss N.K. Jemisin's fantastic The City We Became. It's a book about New York. And about cities.

The City We Became is a 2020 urban fantasy novel by N. K. Jemisin. Taking place in New York City (a setting in which we are heavily invested), the City itself is in peril in a world where great cities become sentient through human avatars. After the avatar of New York falls into a supernatural coma and vanishes, a group of five new avatars representing the five boroughs come together to fight their common Enemy.

It's the first book in her ongoing The Great Cities series, but it is self-contained and well worth reading alone. We've discussed her work before in the book club with The Fifth Season (also 1000% worth reading)!

Tonight on GeekNights, we bring you the GeekNights Book Club: The Tale of Genji part 1. We have a lot to say, so we're splitting this one in two. The first episode covers our reactions to the work as fiction. This second episode covers the meta, structure, history, and anything else we had to say.

For those interested, the next book club book will be N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became.

Tonight on GeekNights, we bring you the GeekNights Book Club: The Tale of Genji part 1. We have a lot to say, so we're splitting this one in two. This first episode covers our reactions to the work as fiction. We'll save some of the meta conversation for a followup episode to come. You can use this handy chart to follow along.

For those interested, the next book club book will be N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became.

Tonight on the GeekNights Book Club, we consider our thoughts on Troy Denning's 1996 Planescape novel Pages of Pain. Rym read this when he was young, and remembered it being the best of the Dungeons & Dragons branded novels. Surprisingly, this opinion is not entirely uncommon. Will adult brain see otherwise? Is it merely the bar being so very, very low? The GeekNights Book Club will decide. Take a journey with us to the sensibilities of 1996!

The Lady of Pain, vigilant defender of Sigil, keeps an ongoing memoir of her existence. Here, in her own words, is her eternal story. Interspersed with these memoir passages is a story that takes plae in the maze where threats to Sigil are incarcerated for all eternity.

Tonight on the GeekNights Book Club, we consider Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. You may have seen the movie.

In 1968 Stanley Kubrick released one of the all-time classic movies, "2001: a Space Odyssey". Until recently I had thought that this movie was based on the book of the same name. That is not the case.

What actually happened is that Arthur C. Clarke was writing the novel and also working on the screenplay with Kubrick simultaneously. The novel wasn't actually published until after the movie was released.

It would be impossible to maintain our pride as geeks without having read one of the most well known sci-fi novels of all time. It will be fascinating to see how it differs from the movie. I'm especially interested to see how the more psychedelic parts of the movie translate to written language.