Deus Ex Media Book Club

If you’ve explored the Deus Ex Media podcasts, it will probably come as no surprise to you that we love books here. In August 2021, we decided to make that love official and launch the Deus Ex Media Book Club.

Book Club Facilitator Taylor has done a ton of work in developing the Book Club and making sure it runs smoothly from month to month. She created and manages the Book Club Discord server, where participants can come and go to chat about the Book Club selection or other bookish topics.

How it works

Participants take turns leading Book Club each month, with careful support from Taylor and other Deus Ex Media leaders. While participants are not required to lead any Book Club selections, it has turned out that most of them want to! We hope that by creating a positive, safe environment to share our favorite books with each other and explore new books as well, more people will join up and get to book chattin’.

The book of the month is chosen a week or more before the month starts to give participants ample time to purchase or check out from the library. Sometimes a host has a particular book in mind; often, they have a couple of choices, and the entire Club has the opportunity to vote on which they’d like to read.

As the new month begins, each participant is welcome to read at their own pace. Our Discord server is set up so every couple of chapters gets its own channel for discussion, so it’s easy to chat about what you’ve read so far without risking seeing spoilers.

Around halfway through the month, the host will begin posting discussion questions in the Discord server. Participants are welcome to engage with those questions or simply watch others discuss; some participants don’t have time to hang out in the server, so they only attend the end-of-month Book Club Zoom meetings.

Typically on the final Tuesday of each month, the Book Club meets over Zoom to chat face-to-face about what they’ve read. The host will lead the discussion, often with the help of a PowerPoint presentation. These conversations tend to be very open-ended and help to bring together all of the disjointed chats from the Discord server!

By that time, the next month’s book will have been chosen, and after the meeting, focus shifts to the next book.

What we've read so far

All book descriptions are adapted from StoryGraph.

August 2021
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
Host: Taylor

Ariadne, Princess of Crete, grows up listening to her nursemaid's stories of gods and heroes. But beneath her golden palace echo the ever-present hoofbeats of her brother, the Minotaur, a monster who demands blood sacrifice. When Theseus, the Prince of Athens, arrives to vanquish the beast, Ariadne defies the gods, betrays her family and country, and risks everything for love.

---

September 2021
The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec
Host: Alex

Angrboda’s story begins where most witch tales end: with being burnt. She flees into the furthest reaches of a remote forest, and there she is found by a man who reveals himself to be the trickster god Loki. Her initial distrust of him—and any of his kind—grows reluctantly into a deep and abiding love. But as Angrboda slowly recovers her prophetic powers, she learns that her blissful life—and possibly all of existence—is in danger. Angrboda must choose whether she’ll accept the fate that she’s foreseen for her beloved family—or rise to remake it.

---

October 2021
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Host: Christina

This beloved gothic tale follows a peculiar girl named Merricat and explores her family's dark secret. Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, this deliciously unsettling novel depicts a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

---

November 2021
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Host: Zach

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate mission—and if he fails, the earth itself will perish. Except he can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. He’s just been awoken to find himself millions of miles from home. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he has to do it all alone.

---

December 2021
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Host: Adele 

Casiopea Tun dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. One day, she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. She opens it—and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother. Failure will mean Casiopea’s demise, but success could make her dreams come true. In the company of the strangely alluring god and armed with her wits, Casiopea begins an adventure that will take her on a cross-country odyssey from the jungles of Yucatán to the bright lights of Mexico City—and deep into the darkness of the Mayan underworld.

---

January 2022
Anxious People by Frederik Backman
Host: Clare

Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises these reluctant allies will set in motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.

---

February 2022
A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
Host: Taylor

By centering Black women's stories, the authors offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in the US to African American women of today. This book showcases Black women's lives in all their fraught complexities, prioritizing many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women's history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.

---

March 2022
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
Host: S

Zetian is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises.​ To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way—and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

---

April 2022
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez
Host: Elise

These short stories are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken—fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history—with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma. These stories are set against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina and were written with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo.

---

May 2022
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Host: Alex

With humor and heart, Michelle Zauner tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

---

June 2022
All Out: The No-Longer Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages ed. Saundra Michell
Host: Christina ​

Seventeen young adult authors across the queer spectrum have come together to create a collection of beautifully written diverse historical fiction for teens. From a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set in war-torn 1870s Mexico featuring a transgender soldier, to two girls falling in love while mourning the death of Kurt Cobain, to forbidden love in a sixteenth-century Spanish convent, and an asexual girl discovering her identity amid the 1970s roller-disco scene, All Out tells a diverse range of stories across cultures, time periods, and identities, shedding light on an area of history often ignored or forgotten.

---

July 2022
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas McAdams
Host: Takenna

Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work human actor. Together, they begin a journey through space aided by a galaxyful of fellow travelers. Why are we born? Why do we die? What’s the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? For all the answers, stick your thumb to the stars