Book Salad

Book Salad meets on the last Tuesday of every month, at 6:30pm. You're very welcome to join us! To make a salad you put together lots of different things you'd like to eat, and we do the same. Every month, instead of reading one kind of book, we mix genres. We tend to read mostly imaginative fiction but occasionally we pick non-fiction, by authors from different ages and backgrounds. We limit numbers to fifteen attendees and it's very friendly and informal.

For our third book of 2026, we will read 'Polostan' by Neal Stephenson. Stephenson has written numerous, quite different novels. Two examples being his 1992 metaverse thriller, 'Snow Crash', and his 'Baroque Cycle', three historical fiction novels about alchemy and the history of money that runs to over three thousand pages. I don't think his writing occupies a single genre, but he is most often called a science-fiction author which I think puts some people off.

'Polostan' is the first of a new trilogy called Bomb Light, which begins in the early twentieth century and will eventually overtake us and describe future events. The historical setting and intrigue of our previous book, 'Cahokia Jazz' should set us up nicely for 'Polostan', I hope.

Here's the blurb:

Polostan by Neal Stephenson

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Termination Shock and Cryptonomicon, the first installment in a monumental new trilogy—an expansive historical epic of intrigue and international espionage, presaging the dawn of the Atomic Age.

Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn Rae Bjornberg is raised in post-Revolution Leningrad by her father, a party-line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora.

She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gun-running and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C. during the depths of the Great Depression.

When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB…

Set against the turbulent decades of the early 20th century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic, and the start of a captivating new series from Neal Stephenson.

I was asked to provide a provisional Reading List for the rest of our year, so here it is:

March: 'Polostan' by Neal Stephenson

April: 'Wave Walker' by Suzanne Heywood

May: 'The Go-Between' by L.P. Hartley

June: 'Captains of the Sands' by Jorge Amado

July: 'The Impostor and Other Stories' by Silvina Ocampo

August: 'The Man Who Was Thursday' by G.K. Chesterton

September: 'The Sundial' by Shirley Jackson

October: 'The Blizzard' by Vladimir Sorokin

November: ?

December: 'A Chess Story' by Stefan Zweig (We don't meet in December but this is the short book I've decided I'll be reading)