Book Clubs San Francisco

2nd Saturday "Not quite a book club" in the Richmond District

Show up having read a book\* you want to talk about. Get a beverage and/or food inside the cafe. We will probably meet outside in Bazaar Cafe's back garden.\*\* (The garden is accessible through an alley. There is a door to the alley next to the register inside. You can also go directly to the back garden from the street via the alley entrance on the right side of the right Cafe window.) Once you've spotted the group, we will introduce ourselves and have a brief period of chit chat. Then we will go around our group each talking about the (different!) books we read. Afterwards, you are welcome to stick around and chat. If you have a physical book you are done reading and want to offer other folks in the group, you are welcome to do that, but there is absolutely no obligation to do so. \*Any book! Could be a graphic novel, or non-fiction, or fiction, or a mystery or a romance novel or SciFi or Fantasy! \*\*If it is raining or a really bad air day from wildfires, it may be too crowded inside Bazaar Cafe to find a table, although it was raining during a few meetings early last year and the Bazaar cafe folks helped me stake out a table. In the event of rain and no space inside, I will probably move the event a few blocks away to Ilana Coffee or Royal Ground Coffee on Clement. I will message the group if we meet inside or if the location moves to another coffee shop.

October 2026 Book Discussion: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

**Our October Book Has Been Chosen! 📚** **Thanks to everyone who voted! Our next Books & Brew read is:** **🌿 The Vegetarian — Han Kang** **Grab a copy, start reading, and join us for a great conversation!** **About the Book** **After a series of disturbing dreams, Yeong-hye makes the seemingly simple decision to stop eating meat. But as her family reacts with increasing confusion, anger, and attempts to control her, that decision becomes the beginning of a much more profound transformation.** **Told through the perspectives of those around Yeong-hye, The Vegetarian explores autonomy, desire, conformity, violence, and the ways we understand—or fail to understand—the people closest to us.** **Originally published in Korean and translated by Deborah Smith, Han Kang’s unsettling novel won the 2016 International Booker Prize and invites plenty of questions about identity, choice, and what happens when someone refuses to live according to the expectations placed upon them.** **──────────** **📸 Follow us on Instagram @booksandbrew_oakland for meetup photos, book announcements, and future events.**

Book Club: "Cat's People" by Tanya Guerrero

Halloween is coming up but instead of reading a scary horror story, let's read an uplifting tale where a black cat is a main character! We'll discuss "Cat's People" by Tanya Guerrero. There are several copies available at the library so it should be easy to get! The location is TBD but will be in the Burlingame/San Mateo/Foster City area. We'll decide after the September meeting! Everyone will be waitlisted initially. Priority will be given to previous attendees of book club and regular attendees of the group. For details on attendance & waitlist, please see the "About us" description for the group. **Book Summary - "Cat's People" by Tanya Guerrero** Publication Year: 2025 Page Count: 300 Núria, a single-by-choice barista with a resentment for the "crazy cat lady" label, is a member of The Meow-Yorkers, a group in Brooklyn who takes care of the neighborhood’s stray cats. On one of her volunteering days, she starts finding Post-It notes from a secret admirer at the spot where her favorite stray lives—a black cat named Cat. Like most cats, he is rather curious and sly, so of course he knows who the notes are from. Núria, however, is clueless. Are the notes from Collin, a bestselling author and self-professed hermit with a weakness for good coffee? Are they from Lily, a fresh-out-of-high school Georgia native searching for her long-lost half-sister? Are they from Omar, the beloved neighborhood mailman going through an early mid-life crisis? Or are they from Bong, the grieving widower who owns her favorite bodega? When Cat suddenly falls ill, these five strangers find themselves connected in their desire to care for him and discover that chance encounters can lead to the meaningful connections they've been searching for.

Profs & Pints San Francisco: The Rise of Vampires

[Profs and Pints San Francisco](https://www.profsandpints.com/sfbayarea) presents: **“The Rise of Vampires,”** on the folkloric origins and literary evolution of today’s fanged fiends, with Sara Hackenberg, professor of English at San Francisco State University and scholar of Victorian literature and literature’s vampire tradition. [Tickets must be purchased online, at [https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/san-francisco-rise-of-vampires](https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/san-francisco-rise-of-vampires) .] Did you know that vampires sprang from literature nearly a whole century before Bram Stoker wrote *Dracula*, and that they prowled in folklore for centuries before that? You’d have to visit a lot of gravesites to witness the unearthing of as many vampires as will be raised at the October 12th debut of Profs and Pints at The Dairy community space at San Francisco’s Presidio Sports Basement. The excavation will be carried out by Professor Sara Hackenberg, who previously has given excellent Profs and Pints talks on vampires and Christmas ghost stories. She’ll show you the vampire beneath the vampire beneath the vampire, tracing their evolution in old European folklore and the English literature of the nineteenth-century. You’ll get to know the seductive, snaky Lamia in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1816 poem “Christabel” and the sapphic seductress at the center of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla. You’ll spend time with the mad, bad, and dangerous Byronic vampire that originated in John Polidori’s 1819 gothic horror story “The Vampyre,” found his way into theatrical adaptations such as James Planché’s 1820 “The Bride of the Isles,” and then stalked through cheap popular publications–known as “penny bloods” or later as “penny dreadfuls”—such as James Malcolm Rymer’s mid-1800s serial *Varney, The Vampire.* We’ll consider how Bram Stoker was influenced by all of these texts and folded a variety of characteristics of their fearsome femmes and hommes fatales into Count Dracula, the most famous literary vampire of all. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Door price: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.) Image: “The Premature Burial,” an 1854 painting by Antoine Wiertz (Wiertz Museum / Wikimedia).

CONSCIOUS GIRL LIT CLUB: Communion

Communion by bell hooks Inspired by: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWonXNrjW8j/

SF CogSci #33: Behave, by Robert Sapolsky

We're continuing Behave, by Robert Sapolsky - moving on from chapters 1-6, which we discussed last time, and doing the rest of the book. If you're attending in person, please be sure to register [here](https://luma.com/san-francisco-cognitive-science-reading--5c00) as well, so you can get into the building. Thank you! Tom

East Bay Women's Book Club October Meetup: True Biz

Hello, fellow female readers -- The book for the October Meetup is True Biz by Sara Novic. For those of you who are new, I will send out the address to my house by Monday, October 19. Looking forward to gathering together and discussing the book. Bonnie

SFVS Members Only: Book Club October Meeting

**\*\*\*SFVS Members Only Event RSVP Via Zeffy Not Meetup\*\*\*** The RSVP invite was sent directly to members on 9/21. Please [message us](bookclub@sfvs.org) if [you are a member](https://www.sfvs.org/membership) and didn't receive an invite. Join fellow SFVS members for our October book club gathering where we will be discussing the first couple of sections of John Sanbonmatsu's 2025 book, The Omnivore's Deception. We will read to the end of Part II which is the first 119 pages. We'll read the rest of the book and discuss it in November. John Sanbonmatsu will be a featured speaker at VegFest on November 14, and members will be able to mingle with him following his talk. We look forward to another month of great conversation, connection, and community! Book Club is for SFVS Members only. If you are a new member and Zeffy does not let you RSVP, it's because we need to manually add you to the invite. Questions? Need help? Reach out to us at [bookclub@sfvs.org](mailto:bookclub@sfvs.org).

SF CogSci #34

Note: this session has been moved from November 17 to November 3 — same time, same place. Sorry for the shuffle. Voting is open for what we'll read at this session — please cast your vote [here](https://forms.gle/4U4XoLmYzC9JeRQQ6) by Friday, October 2nd. We'll be voting on a paper to discuss - details and the vote link to follow. If you're attending in person, please be sure to register [here](https://luma.com/san-francisco-cognitive-science-reading--9b7e) as well, so you can get into the building. Thank you! Tom

October 21: Rachel Khong - My Dear You

NOTE: Meeting on the 21st this month! Third Weds, not second! **Recommended Stories:** * My Dear You * Serene * D Day This one has been getting some rave reviews and was a joint winner in our poll for October! Her novel *Real Americans* was highly successful and we're looking forward to reading her short form. **For First-Timers:** We recommend reading at least one story, but feel free to read as little or as much as you'd like! Discussion is open, informal, and we try to focus on the recommended stories listed above. **About the Collection:** Khong's first story collection and her swerve from realism into the surreal: afterlives, government race-perception drugs, ghost-conjuring cats — magic treated matter-of-factly, in service of grief, love, and identity.

2nd Saturday "Not quite a book club" in the Richmond District

Show up having read a book\* you want to talk about. Get a beverage and/or food inside the cafe. We will probably meet outside in Bazaar Cafe's back garden.\*\* (The garden is accessible through an alley. There is a door to the alley next to the register inside. You can also go directly to the back garden from the street via the alley entrance on the right side of the right Cafe window.) Once you've spotted the group, we will introduce ourselves and have a brief period of chit chat. Then we will go around our group each talking about the (different!) books we read. Afterwards, you are welcome to stick around and chat. If you have a physical book you are done reading and want to offer other folks in the group, you are welcome to do that, but there is absolutely no obligation to do so. \*Any book! Could be a graphic novel, or non-fiction, or fiction, or a mystery or a romance novel or SciFi or Fantasy! \*\*If it is raining or a really bad air day from wildfires, it may be too crowded inside Bazaar Cafe to find a table, although it was raining during a few meetings early last year and the Bazaar cafe folks helped me stake out a table. In the event of rain and no space inside, I will probably move the event a few blocks away to Ilana Coffee or Royal Ground Coffee on Clement. I will message the group if we meet inside or if the location moves to another coffee shop.

Book Club Italiano San Francisco