The Mission
Welcome to Trent’s Book Club! We are a group of friends that meet in-person approximately monthly to discuss a book and hang out. Meeting information is disseminated via email.
“One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Books are selected based on member suggestions and discussion at each meeting. The guiding rule for selection is that the book is worth reading. As Arthur said, nobody wants to spend their time slogging through a bad book. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a book is bad ahead of time, but we try our best.
| Seattle, WA | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Date | Author | Title | Year |
| 04/03/2026 | Marilynne Robinson | Gilead | 2004 |
| 02/18/2026 | David Szalay | Flesh | 2025 |
| 11/21/2025 | Agatha Christie | Murder on the Orient Express | 1934 |
| 10/06/2025 | Emily Habeck | Shark Heart | 2023 |
| 07/22/2025 | Alexander Sammartino | Last Acts | 2024 |
| 06/04/2025 | Jeff VanderMeer | Annihilation | 2014 |
| 04/22/2025 | Joan Didion | Play It as It Lays | 1970 |
| 03/09/2025 | Elena Ferrante | My Brilliant Friend | 2012 |
| 01/25/2025 | - | Book exchange round-up | - |
| 12/07/2024 | Stephen King | Carrie | 1974 |
| 10/19/2024 | Olga Tokarczuk | Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead | 2009 |
| 08/27/2024 | Junot Diaz | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | 2007 |
| 07/10/2024 | Elif Shafak | 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World | 2019 |
| 06/07/2024 | Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone | This Is How You Lose the Time War | 2020 |
| 03/23/2024 | Milan Kundera | The Unbearable Lightness of Being | 1984 |
| 02/02/2024 | Daniel J. Brown | The Boys in the Boat | 2013 |
| 12/12/2023 | George Saunders | Lincoln in the Bardo | 2017 |
| 11/03/2023 | Ottessa Moshfegh | My Year of Rest and Relaxation | 2018 |
| 10/03/2023 | James M. Cain | The Postman Always Rings Twice | 1934 |
| 09/08/2023 | Colson Whitehead | The Underground Railroad | 2016 |
| 08/04/2023 | Kazuo Ishiguro | Never Let Me Go | 2005 |
| 07/03/2023 | Shelby Van Pelt | Remarkably Bright Creatures | 2022 |
Trent’s Personal Favorites
I like to read other books too. Here are some of my personal favorites:
| Author | Title | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Hernan Diaz | Trust | 2022 |
| Gabriel Garcia Marquez | One Hundred Years of Solitude | 1967 |
| Herman Hesse | The Glass Bead Game | 1943 |
| Benjamin Labatut | When We Cease to Understand the World | 2020 |
| David Mitchell | Cloud Atlas | 2004 |
| Haruki Murakami | Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World | 1985 |
| Carl Sagan | The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark | 1995 |
| George Saunders | CivilWarLand in Bad Decline | 1996 |