Beyond Reality discussion

Hi everyone,

Welcome to July! Hopefully this Summer will bring lots of reading time and good books your way!

As always, we have two new Books of the Month. This month, you voted for:

Fantasy: The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan
SF: Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg

If you read these books, please let us know what you thought of them! Opinions, interpretations, questions, reviews, rants and raves --- all of them are welcome! I've just created the discussion folders with a few initial topics, but please feel free to add new topics/discussion threads. (Also, in the future, if anyone is very familiar with the book and would like to be a "discussion leader" for that book, please shoot me a message!)

We also just closed the polls for our September BotMs, so we now have the schedule for the next couple of months:

August FANTASY
Mistborn The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

August SCIENCE FICTION
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

September FANTASY
The City & the City by China Miéville

September SCIENCE FICTION
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

(And if you take a look at those polls, you'll see that the Tim Powers books lost by only one vote! Maybe a good one to re-nominate, once we start taking nominations for October?)

As you know, we're also well into our first ever SERIES DISCUSSION. The series is the Miles Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. We started discussing the first book, Shards of Honour, on June 15th - and so far it's been one of the most interesting book discussions I've ever seen in this group! We'll start discussing book 2 in the series, Barrayar, on July 15th, so you still have plenty of time to get into the action. (By the way, you can find the reading order for the entire series here)

As always, we have set up polls for you to register your opinion of our BotMs. Please take a moment to vote, as your votes decide which books move into our Hall of Fame. We need at least 10 votes for a book to eligible to enter the Hall of Fame. The polls stay open for 3 months, so there's plenty of time to cast or change your vote. Here are all the current polls.

The polls for our April books just ended. Neither of the books got a high enough score to make it into the Beyond Reality Hall of Fame, but His Majesty's Dragon did get 21 scoring votes, which is one of the highest number I've seen in a while - very encouraging.

Finally, if you're not interested in reading our Book of the Months, please take a moment to let us know which other books you're reading in our What are you reading right now? thread. (PS I closed the first "what are you reading?" thread and will start a new one each month, so they don't get too long.)

Enjoy!

Stefan