Announcing! The Live Like Fiction Book Club!

I decided it would be fun to host a book club as part of this blog! But instead of what you may be thinking, which is memoirs and farm books, I want to do something different. I want to share the works of fiction that inspire and created Cold Antler Farm. These will all be fantasy novels, and if you are new to the genre you won't be disappointed.

Here's how it'll work. I announce a book and then we all get a hold of it. All LLF book selections will be available in three formats for accessibility: paper book, e-book, and audiobook. If you are like me you love a good story but don't necessarily have the patience (or time) to sit and finish a novel in a month - listening is a fine option. Audiobooks are wonderful, and they sure as heck count in this club. You can listen at the gym, in your car, or through a speaker in your kitchen while doing the dishes.

Everyone has a month to finish the book, and then we discuss it here on the blog. It'll be a long string of comments or possibly something like a Google hangout if you want to tune in for a live streaming conversation.

The first pick will be a favorite I heard about through you, the readership of this blog: S.M. Stirling's Dies The Fire: A Novel of the Change. It's wonderful, and the reason I am both an archer and a Mackenzie in the SCA. The book is about modern America, roughly around the late 1990's. The story takes place in the Willamette Valley of the Pacific Northwest. If you live around Bend, Eugene, Corvallis, and such areas of Oregon you will really be able to devour this book, as that is where it takes place. One day around dinner time a huge bright light flashes and all electricity shuts off. But this isn't just an EMP or act of international war. All engines stop working, batteries stopped working, all gunpowder stops exploding, and the world's level of technology is thrown into the Bronze Age. Chaos ensues, but two scrappy groups emerge…

One is lead by a singer songwriter and single mother, in her early thirties. She's at a college bar the night this happens and has to escape a city in flames with her friends to her home in the mountains of Oregon. The other is a young pilot for hire, who is caught in the air in a small transporter plane when it starts to crash into the Idaho Mountains with some wealthy clients…

We follow these two people, along with their fellow church members and neighbors start new societies where agriculture, archery, hand-to-hand armored combat are the norm and horses are the only mustangs on the open road. It's post-apocalyptic fictional fantasy, emphasis on the fantasy and not the horror of a dying world

Why I think you guys would love this? Because in this fantasy novel it is the homesteaders who take over! The only folks who still know the skills to farm and create are folks who restart society. They, and the people who went out of their way to practice hobbies most "normal" people felt were archaic before "The Change" happened. It is folks in the SCA, fencing classes, martial arts, that know how to protect themselves without guns. It is the dairy farmers, leather workers, carpenters, weavers, knitters, chefs, ranchers and cowboys…these are the people who inherit the earth. And all the while trying to be whole again and peaceful while a man who decided to turn Portland into his very own kingdom becomes more and more maniacal. Drama!

This book has adult language and situations. Not a lot of intense sexual content, but a fair amount of violence and choice words. It's one of the books I really think thrives as an audiobook, too, since so many accents are involved. I think its worth starting that audible.com membership, folks. You can get a 30-day free trial and download Dies The Fire for FREE if you click this link here.

So whose in?