Comic Book Clubs San Francisco

Book Club Too

August 2026 Bookclub Discussion: At the Edge of the Haight — Katherine Seligman

# 📚 Our August Book Has Been Chosen! Thanks to everyone who voted! Our next **Books & Brew** read is: ## 🌉 *At the Edge of the Haight* — Katherine Seligman Grab a copy, start reading, and join us for a great conversation! ### About the Book Twenty-year-old Maddy Donaldo has built a life for herself on the streets of San Francisco, finding family, routine, and survival in the hidden corners of Golden Gate Park. But when she witnesses the murder of a young homeless boy—and the killer sees her—her world is turned upside down. As police, grieving parents, and her own estranged family search for answers, Maddy must decide whether to continue hiding from the world or risk letting herself be found. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing San Francisco, *At the Edge of the Haight* explores homelessness, belonging, community, and the difficult choices that shape our lives. ────────── 📸 Follow us on Instagram **@booksandbrew_oakland** for meetup photos, book announcements, and future events.

Reading Group #31: Reasoning Models Generate Societies of Thought

Thank you to everyone who voted for our next reading! We will be reading [Reasoning Models Generate Societies of Thought](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10825), by Kim, Lai, Scherrer, Aguera y Arcas, and Evans (a suggestion from *someone* after July’s meet) - 112 pages but only the first \~30 are the paper proper, so more tractable than it might appear. If you'd like to dial in remotely, please leave a comment and we'll get that set up for you. If no-one comments, it'll be in person only. If you are attending in person, please also add yourself to the event at https://luma.com/san-francisco-cognitive-science-reading- … so you can get into the building. Thank you! Tom

Book Club: "We Begin at the End" by Chris Whitaker

For our next book club meeting, let's read and discuss "We Begin at the End" by Chris Whitaker! There are several copies available at the library as well as the audiobook 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 July 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 - "We Begin at the End" by Chris Whitaker** Publication Year: 2020 Page Count: 384 Right. Wrong. Life is lived somewhere in between. Duchess Day Radley is a 13-year-old self-proclaimed outlaw. Rules are for other people. She is the fierce protector of her 5-year-old brother, Robin, and the parent to her mother, Star, a single mom incapable of taking care of herself, let alone her two kids. Walk has never left the coastal California town where he and Star grew up. He may have become the chief of police, but he’s still trying to heal the old wound of having given the testimony that sent his best friend, Vincent King, to prison decades before. And he's in overdrive protecting Duchess and her brother. Now, 30 years later, Vincent is being released. And Duchess and Walk must face the trouble that comes with his return. *We Begin at the End* is an extraordinary novel about two kinds of families—the ones we are born into and the ones we create.

East Bay Women's Book Club August Meetup: Yesteryear

Hello, fellow female readers -- The book for the August Meetup is Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke For those of you who are new, I will send out the address to my house by Monday, August 17. Looking forward to gathering together and discussing the book. Bonnie

SFVS Members Only: Book Club August Meeting

**\*\*\*SFVS Members Only Event RSVP Via Partiful Not Meetup\*\*\*** The invite was sent directly to members on 7/11, please [message us](bookclub@sfvs.org) if [you are a member](https://www.sfvs.org/membership) and didn't receive an invite. Due to how popular/loved Oryx and Crake was by the group in July, we'll be reading Margaret Atwood's follow-up book in the trilogy: Year of the Flood! Don't worry if you haven't read Oryx and Crake though, Atwood said during an interview you can absolutely read it as a stand-alone book without getting lost :) 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 Partiful 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).

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.

August Meeting: Banana Yoshimoto - Lizard

**Recommended Stories:** * Newlywed * Lizard * A Strange Tale from Down by the River Always wanted to read this "spare, dreamlike" Japanese author. Looking forward to discussing it! **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 Author:** Banana Yoshimoto (born Mahoko Yoshimoto in 1964) is one of the most internationally recognized voices in contemporary Japanese fiction. Her stories often center on grief, healing, and young women navigating loss

Book Club Italiano San Francisco

Read Audre Lorde and have fancy cocktails

Books & Brunch August

The Emergent Mind by Gaurav Suri, Jay McClelland

Our book for August is *The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines* by Gaurav Suri, Jay McClelland For those who are interested, here is the [link](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w0ioSBKFd6fWBgv2yW8k1x9bfwLPFcD-9zgvSUth88Q/edit?gid=1204962740#gid=1204962740) to the detailed results from the voting. *The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines* (2025) is a work of popular science that examines how thought, perception, and decision-making take shape in both human brains and artificial intelligence systems. Its central concept is emergence—the idea that complex systems can arise from the interactions of many simple parts, none of which is individually intelligent. The authors build intuition for this idea using everyday examples, such as water molecules forming a liquid or ants collectively finding an efficient path, before extending it to neural networks: the framework, originally developed as a model of human cognition, that now underpins modern AI systems from chatbots to image generators. The book traces how the same principles that helped scientists understand perception, language, and choice in people came to drive advances in machine intelligence, and it argues that modeling the mind in this way does not reduce human beings to machines. It closes by considering the current limits of AI, which still depends on large amounts of data and lacks human-like goals, and the possibility of more autonomous systems emerging in the future. The book is co-authored by two cognitive scientists. Jay McClelland is a professor of psychology, computer science, and linguistics at Stanford University, where he directs the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation, and Technology; he was a key figure in reviving neural network modeling in the 1980s, and his work helped lay the groundwork for today's deep learning. Gaurav Suri is an associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, a computational neuroscientist and experimental psychologist who studies motivation and decision-making, and a co-author of the novel *A Certain Ambiguity*. The two met in 2014, and this is their first book together. *The Emergent Mind* was named a Best Book of the Year by *New Scientist* and selected by the Next Big Idea Club, and it is written for a general audience without requiring a technical background. This event will be hybrid. I will host the meeting in person at my house in Berkeley which is near the intersection of College Ave and Woolsey St. I will email people the address the Saturday before the meeting. Here are the Google Meet details: Google Meet link: [https://meet.google.com/zem-xnbw-tuh](https://meet.google.com/zem-xnbw-tuh) Or dial: ‪(US) +1 641-854-0146‬ PIN: ‪637 012 874‬#