Upcoming Books:
October 23
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee

"Three texts – Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Edwin Muir’s ‘The Horses’ (1956), and Rusell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980 exemplify not only the themes and preoccupation of this body of discourse, but highlight characteristic Anglo-American post- Apocalyptic fears. These include: shattered language; encounters with the remains of the unspeakable and unknowable; and later generations’ crippling, ignorant hungers for a world – and hope – that was forever destroyed." - "They Speak in Mangled ‘Memberment’: Miller’s, Muir’s, and Hoban’s Recolletive Journeys to the Edge of Incomprehensibility.” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Charles E. Gannon, English Department, St. Bonaventure University, 2003 

Author Bio:

Walter M. Miller, Jr., is an enigmatic figure in mid-century American science fiction. An engineer with World War II flying experience, who wrote science fiction of a technophilic variety, he also studded his stories with allusions, clear and cloudy, to the Judeo-Christian tradition, generally bathed in a generous light. A commercial writer who boasted a million words by 1955, including scripts for television’s Captain Video, he came to write progressively more complex, sophisticated, problematic stories until, having more or less perfected his art, he stopped writing at the pinnacle of his success, at the age of 36. A Southern Catholic, born in Florida in 1923, he wrote his best-known work about a future order of monks founded in Arizona in the name of a Jewish engineer.- David N. Samuelson read more
Author Quotes: "There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God's and not Man's, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection." --A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959; New York: Bantam/Spectra, 1997), pp. 145-146.
Read BExtraordinaire Blog for more reviews on our next book club selection. 
is reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz"  written by Walter M. Miller, Jr. for September 25. 

Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction novel, The Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. is a provocative, fascinating and disturbing apocalyptic novel told in three separate novellas set centuries apart. It was written in 1959 in the midst of the Cold War. This was a time of fear and anxiety that inspired a proliferation of armageddon tales filled with destruction and chaos. In Miller's novel each section revolves around an event that plunges the world into darkness and ignorance consuming most of humanity and its knowledge. The first occurs during about the time of the Dark Ages; the second the Renaissance; and the third is about 1,800 years later with the nations of mankind threatening nuclear war.

It begins 600 years after a nuclear holocaust knocks mankind into a new Dark Age, with Brother Francis, the novice monk fasting in a southwestern desert. Brother Francis discovers an abandoned nuclear shelter filled with a treasure trove of artifacts surviving the "Flame Deluge" from the time of the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s.  The monks guard what an electrical engineer named Isacc Leibowitz has left behind.

Over the course of the novel, the knowledge found in the shelter helps humanity back on its feet only to repeat its own mistakes over and over again.