Vancouver Fantasy & Sci-Fi Group

### 📚🤫 When was the last time you read for 90 minutes straight? - Silent Reading Party + book chat

Bring-your-own-book. Mostly silent. Last 30 minutes = optional talk + recommendations.

Short summary
Your phone is loud. The world is loud. Your brain is tired.
This meetup is a small, quiet rebellion: we show up with whatever we’re currently reading, sit together, and read in silence for most of the time.
No assigned book. No performance. Just that rare feeling of being around people… without needing to be “on.”
Then, in the last 30 minutes, we switch modes and share what we’re reading - quick, casual, and useful (you’ll leave with a few real book recommendations).

What we’ll talk about

• What are you reading right now - and why that book, right now? (Comfort read? ambition read? “I need my brain back” read?)
• What line or idea did you underline today? The one that made you stop for a second.
• What book have you been carrying around for weeks but never start? (Your personal TBR guilt.)
• Does reading feel different when other people are reading too? Like… calmer? more focused? less lonely?
• What’s one book you’d bet a stranger would love - and why? (Give us your strongest pitch.)

How we’ll do it

• Quick settle-in (1–2 minute hellos if you want)
• Silent reading block (~90 minutes)
• Last 30 minutes: optional chat + recommendations (small groups or one circle - depends on the room)
• You can leave early if you need to - the reading part is the main event.

Bring

• Any book (paper, ebook, audiobook with headphones - all good)
• Water / tea
• Optional: a sweater (reading makes time disappear)

When and where

🗓️ Date: Tuesday May 19th
🕒 Time: 4:00 PM
📍 Location: Central Library - Meeting Rooms - Level 5 south side room

Cap 8 + waitlist
Keeping it small so it stays calm and easy.
Optional note
This is a quiet space. If you need to take a call or chat, just step outside and come back in.

“What does freedom really mean when you have nothing—and everything—to lose?

Looking for a book that will spark real conversation? Join us as we dive into The Dispossessed—a novel that doesn’t just imagine a new world, but asks bold questions about our own.

Bring your favourite quotes from the book! I have many!!

Summary:

The novel follows Shevek, a brilliant physicist from the barren moon Anarres, an anarchist society founded on ideals of equality and shared ownership. Frustrated by growing conformity and intellectual isolation there, he travels to its twin planet Urras, a wealthy but deeply unequal, capitalist world.

In this session, we’ll explore many questions such as (but not limited to):

• What does freedom actually look like in practice?

• Can a society function without ownership or hierarchy?

• Does freedom end where hierarchy begins?

• Where is the line between idealism and control

• What does freedom mean to you?

• Can equality and individuality coexist or do they conflict?

• What are the flaws of both systems?

• Would you want to live on Anarres?

Whether you love science fiction or are simply curious about big philosophical ideas, this book offers something to wrestle with.

Expect lively discussion, differing perspectives, and plenty of moments that make you rethink what you thought you knew about society.

Come ready to question everything that you assumed was “normal” about our society.

Book:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Internet archive pdf version:

https://dn721603.ca.archive.org/0/items/calibre_library_68.132.22.122.231/The%20Dispossessed%20-%20Ursula%20K.%20le%20Guin_788.pdf

When and Where:

🗓️ Date: May 23rd

🕐 Time: 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

📍Location: Room L4 North (492)

### 🎬💍 The Fellowship of the Ring movie - did Peter Jackson capture Tolkien… or make a different beast?

Movie discussion only - watch beforehand. No screening.
Companion event to our Lord of the Rings book club.

Short summary
Now that our slightly overstaffed Vancouver Fellowship has finished The Fellowship of the Ring, it feels wrong not to talk about the movie.
Because Peter Jackson’s Fellowship is not just “the book, but visual.”
It’s an argument about the book.
It speeds some things up. Cuts some things completely. Makes certain characters sharper, softer, cooler, funnier, more tragic. It turns Tolkien’s slower, stranger, more inward story into something cinematic - and the question is whether that was a betrayal, a rescue, or the only way the thing could work on screen.
If you love the movie, come ready to defend it.
If you think the book is stranger and better, come ready too.
If you mostly want to talk about why Boromir still destroys everyone emotionally, you’re among friends.
The question sitting over the whole night
When a film adapts a beloved book, should it be faithful to the plot… or faithful to the feeling?

The arguments I want alive in the room

• Did the movie understand Frodo? Or does film-Frodo become more passive than book-Frodo?
• Aragorn: is the reluctant-king angle an improvement, or did the movie make him more modern and less Tolkien?
• Boromir: did the film make him more tragic, more human, and maybe even better than the book version?
• Moria: why does it hit so hard on screen? Is it the darkness, the music, the scale, the grief, or the fact that everyone suddenly feels small?
• The cuts: Tom Bombadil, the Old Forest, the Barrow-downs - did the movie lose something essential, or was Jackson right to leave them out?
• The Ring: does the movie make the Ring feel more dangerous, or more like a horror-movie object?
• The ending: does the film earn that final emotional break - Frodo leaving, Sam following, the Fellowship broken but not dead?

What the night will feel like
We’ll start with a simple one:
What scene did the movie absolutely nail?
Then the meaner follow-up:
What did the movie get wrong - even if you still love it?
We’ll compare book and film without turning it into a nerd purity test. No one gets points for knowing obscure lore. The goal is to talk about adaptation: what changes when a slow, old, morally serious book becomes a blockbuster movie people quote for twenty years.

What to watch
Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Theatrical version is fine.
Extended edition is welcome.
If you watch the extended cut, just don’t be smug about it. Actually, be a little smug. That’s allowed.

When and where
📅 Date: June 13th
🕒 Time: 2 PM
📍 Location: Central Library, room will be announced on day of

Cap 13 + waitlist
Keeping the “slightly overstaffed Fellowship” energy if I can.
Small note
This is meant as a companion event to the book club, but you can still come if you only watched the movie. Just know we’ll be comparing it to the book openly.