Hello book club of /r/bangtan! Hello readers! Are you ready? Make some nooooiiiiiissseeeee! (This link and all after lead to Giphy unless otherwise noted!) In honor of a recent special performance of a certain song, may I suggest you stop watching and study for your test I mean vote in our poll?
Thank you so much to everyone who participated in last month’s discussion of The Vegetarian by Han Kang trans. Deborah Smith! I was actually in Tampa for the tour for the discussion and will be checking in on the conversation this weekend! If you also missed the discussion, you are also still welcome to join in here! (link leads to Reddit post)
We are back with five BTS-adjacent books to choose from: each month our options are based on a group/member song and connected theme. Over the last few years, we’ve concentrated on books that were either seen with or being read by a member, recommended by or for them, or books about BTS and their music. We thought they might be too restrictive on the chosen theme (our boys love themselves some self-help!), so we’ve expanded our options but you may still see them throughout the year as our ult-list is quite long.
This month’s song and theme are: Equal Sign – Good in the world, Equality
Take a look at May's picks and vote on what we should read next!
Some key dates to remember
(All dates/time are in KST)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| April 30 | Poll opens now – ends May 2 11:59pm |
| May 3 | Voters’ choice book announced |
| May 23 | Books with Luv discussion meeting |
Intro: The Most Beautiful Books in Life
These are the 5 books you get to choose from for the month of May! Links lead to Amazon
| Title – BTS Connection | Description | Page Count |
|---|---|---|
| Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park trans. Anton Hur (2022) | Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life. | 256 |
| Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2015) | It is fifteen years after a flu pandemic wiped out most of the world's population. Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony, a small troupe moving over the gutted landscape, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. But when they arrive in the outpost of St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the disaster brought everyone here, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty, telling a story about the relationships that sustain us. | 352 |
| A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers (2021) | It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They're going to need to ask it a lot. | 160 |
| James by Percival Everett (2024) | When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. | 320 |
| On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2019) | On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. | 256 |
Interlude: You guys are used to voting, right?
(Link goes to Tenor gifs)
Vote for the book you would like to discuss in the next book club!
To vote for the book you would like to discuss in the next book club, CLICK HERE
(Link goes to Canva poll)
Please note, it may say “Your Name Will Be Shared” below the poll. To maintain anonymity, don't login to your Canva account, should you have one. That way your name and email will remain anonymous and we will only see the poll response count.
Outro: If that didn’t make sense, let us know!
As always, if you have questions or suggestions on how we can make discussions even better please let us know. You can post it here or feel free to reach out to any of our lovely volunteers and mods!
With luv,
Our book club volunteers:
And the r/bangtan Mod Team
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