Book Drives San Francisco

East Bay Women's Book Club November Meetup: Held

Hello, fellow female readers -- The book for the November meetup is "Held" by Anne Michaels. For those of you who are new, I will send out the address to my house by Monday, November 16. Looking forward to gathering together and discussing the book. Bonnie

Captivating Book Club & Yummy Lunch

November Book Club: Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Automatic Noodle @ Woods Lowside

Come enjoy a drink at Woods Lowside and discuss our November read! In November we meet a week earlier than usual, so we’re officially making November our Novella month. Our Novella for November is Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. Hope to see you there!

Book, Coffee, Chit Chat, etc. (Tuesday Edition)

ATTENTION: We are now meeting in person again! Please follow current recommendations around mask usage to keep everyone safe. Masks are always welcome and accepted, no matter the current regulations. If you'd like to meet online check out our meeting on the first Wednesday of every month. It's that time again! Let's chit chat about the books we exchanged last time and welcome newcomers bringing their first book. If you've been before you know the deal, otherwise just bring a book to share and expect to say both a few words about it and why you want to share it.

Let’s read “Small Things Like These" by Claire Keegan

November: Colm Tóibín - The News from Dublin

**Recommended Stories:** * The Journey to Galway * The News from Dublin * Five Bridges We're going Irish this November, with a collection from an author I've always wanted to read. Apologies for posting this a bit late. See you there! **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:** Nine stories of quiet, restrained realism — Tóibín's signature mode — mostly circling Ireland, exile, and the things families don't say.

November’s book: The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

Join us in November to discuss *The Curse of Chalion* (2001) by Lois McMaster Bujold 📚 **The Pitch:** What if the only person capable of breaking a terrible curse is someone who desperately wants nothing more than to be left alone? After years of war, imprisonment, and torture, Cazaril returns home hoping for a quiet life. Instead, he becomes secretary and tutor to a young royal woman—and is drawn into a web of court politics, forbidden magic, divine intervention, and a devastating curse threatening the royal family. Lois McMaster Bujold delivers a character-driven, emotionally rich fantasy that blends political intrigue with questions of faith, sacrifice, redemption, and free will. Genre: Political Fantasy • Dark Fantasy

SF CogSci #34: Tapes Together Strong

Note: this session has been moved from November 17 to November 3 — same time, same place. Sorry for the shuffle. The vote for SF CogSci #34 is in. We’ll be reading [Tapes Together Strong: The Co-evolution of Computation and Cooperation](https://arxiv.org/html/2609.10817v1), by Jha, Cicala, Agüera y Arcas, Richards, Jaques, Kleiman-Weiner, and Niklasson (2026). You can read it here. See you Tuesday, November 3rd, 7–9pm at Frontier Tower. 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.

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney

Our book for November 8 is Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney For those who are interested, here is the [link](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JHzu-K6dwAVkc8G6_FKcESeaHyTfBCZY5kezuff5_7o/edit?tab=t.0) to the detailed results from the voting. The book traces how a single prehistoric language became the ancestor of languages now spoken by nearly half the world, including English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, and Persian. That language, Proto-Indo-European, was never written down, and linguists have rebuilt parts of it by comparing its descendants, work that began when an eighteenth-century British judge in India noticed that Sanskrit resembled Latin and Greek. Laura Spinney, a science journalist whose previous book, *Pale Rider*, covered the Spanish flu, writes for a general audience and combines the linguistic record with archaeology and ancient DNA. She places the language's speakers among the Yamnaya, herders on the grasslands north of the Black Sea who began migrating outward about five thousand years ago, and she covers the newer view that the Anatolian languages, such as Hittite, split from an older parent language before the Yamnaya expansion, making them a sister branch rather than a descendant. The book opens with a history of the field, including how the idea of an original Aryan people was used to support theories of racial superiority. After chapters on where the language began and what can be reconstructed of it, Spinney gives a chapter to each major branch: Anatolian; Tocharian, once spoken in what is now western China; Celtic, Germanic, and Italic; Indo-Iranian; Baltic and Slavic; and Albanian, Armenian, and Greek. Along the way she covers what shared vocabulary suggests about the speakers' myths, herding, metalwork, and trade, and considers whether disease, along with conflict, drove the large population turnover in prehistoric Europe. The history is interwoven with visits to the linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists doing the research, and the book closes on what this story means for present-day questions of language and migration. 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 Zoom details: Zoom link: [https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88589978749?pwd=B3aRifcxwzL3kmUTrSJeaPlbozircV.1](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88589978749?pwd=B3aRifcxwzL3kmUTrSJeaPlbozircV.1) Or dial: ‪(US) +1-669-444-9171 Meeting ID:88589978749# Participant ID: none Passcode:690326#

November Book Club: Songteller: My Life in Lyrics by Dolly Parton

2026 has been a loss of legends. I hope you will join me in learning a bit more about Dolly and the life behind the lyrics. Location TBD for now ABOUT THE BOOK New York Times bestseller Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics is a landmark celebration of the remarkable life and career of a country music and pop culture legend. This landmark volume explores the remarkable life and lyrics of the one and only Dolly Parton. As told in her own inimitable words, Songteller explores the songs that have defined Parton's journey. Illustrated throughout with previously unpublished images from her personal and business archives, the Washington Post calls it "a gold mine of little-seen photos and personal anecdotes." Mining over 60 years of songwriting, Dolly Parton highlights 175 of her songs and brings readers behind the lyrics. A celebrity memoir like no other, Dolly Parton, Songteller reveals the stories and memories that have made Dolly a beloved icon across generations, genders, and social and international boundaries.

Song of Solomon

Discuss Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon”