It's time to vote on what the Fiction & History Sickos Book Clubs will be reading in August! I'll have the polls up later this evening in our Discord and those will run for 3 days. Bribery and bullying is expected and encouraged. Below are the four books for each club that will be put up in the vote with a back cover blurb for each.

A quick reminder that to participate in the voting/discussions, you'll need a membership at the Sicko or above tier, that unlocks those channels in our Discord.

Here they the options:

FICTION SICKOS BOOK CLUB OPTIONS

THE ODYSSEY by HOMER (any translation)

We all know what this is and why it's here, right? Cool. Moving on.

THE MOUNTAINS SING by NGUYỄN PHAN QUẾ MAI

"With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore apart not just her beloved country, but also her family."

JAWS by PETER BENCHLEY

"A great white shark terrorizes the beautiful summer getaway of Amity Island, and a motley group of men take to the water to do battle with the beast. A heart-pounding novel of suspense and a brilliant meditation on the nature of humanity, Jaws is one of the most iconic thrillers ever written."

BUTCHER'S CROSSING by JOHN WILLIAMS

"It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been."

HISTORY SICKOS BOOK CLUB OPTIONS

1177 BC: THE YEAR CIVILIZATION COLLAPSED by ERIC H. CLINE

"In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh's army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians... A compelling combination of narrative and the latest scholarship, 1177 B.C. sheds new light on the complex ties that gave rise to, and ultimately destroyed, the flourishing civilizations of the Late Bronze Age―and that set the stage for the emergence of classical Greece."

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY by ELIZABETH KOLBERT

"Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the Sixth Extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us... provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. In the ten years since the book was originally published, evidence of the Sixth Extinction has continued to mount, making its message more urgent than ever..."

HOW TO HIDE AN EMPIRE: A HISTORY OF THE GREATER UNITED STATES by DANIEL IMMERWAHR

"A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire... tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light... Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and fully enjoyable work of history."

BLACK FLAGS, BLUE WATERS: THE EPIC HISTORY OF AMERICA'S MOST NOTORIOUS PIRATES by ERIC JAY DOLIN

"Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the surprising history of American piracy’s “Golden Age” - spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s - when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond... depicts the star pirates of this period, among them the towering Blackbeard, the ill-fated Captain Kidd, and sadistic Edward Low, who delighted in torturing his prey. Upending popular misconceptions and cartoonish stereotypes..."