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
📅 Sunday, May 31, 2026
🕦 11:00am - 1:30PM
📍 Central library, L6 North, room 690

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.

### 🎬💍 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: 12 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.

If you had the chance to dramatically increase your intelligence, knowing it might only be temporary, would you do it?

Join us for the classic book that won a Hugo and
Nebula award!!

Flowers for Algernon is a powerful and emotional science fiction novel about Charlie Gordon, a man with an intellectual disability who undergoes an experimental procedure to increase his intelligence.

As Charlie’s mind rapidly develops beyond anyone’s expectations, he begins to understand love, loneliness, and the painful complexities of human relationships. Told through Charlie’s own journal entries, the story explores intelligence, identity, and what it truly means to be human.

Reading material:

Flowers for Algernon by David Keyes

Where:

🗓️ Date: Sunday June 14th
🕐 Time: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
📍Location: Room L6 North (690)

Discussion only. Bring any edition - print, ebook, audiobook notes, whatever works.

Short summary
We finished The Fellowship of the Ring.
The Fellowship broke. Boromir fell. Frodo left. Sam followed. And now the story does something interesting: it refuses to stay with one hero.
This next stretch is the “meanwhile” section - Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Merry, and Pippin trying to survive the consequences of a mission that has already split apart.
And honestly, this is where some characters get way more interesting than they were before.
Aragorn stops being “mysterious Strider” and has to become a leader in daylight. Merry and Pippin stop being comic relief and get pulled into the machinery of war. The Ents wake up. Rohan enters the story. Saruman becomes less abstract and more disgusting. And the world starts feeling politically alive, not just mythic.
If Fellowship was about forming trust, this section is about what happens after the group breaks and everyone has to become more than they thought they were.

Reading for this session
We’re starting The Two Towers.
Read Book III:

• The Departure of Boromir
• The Riders of Rohan
• The Uruk-hai
• Treebeard
• The White Rider
• The King of the Golden Hall
• Helm’s Deep
• The Road to Isengard
• Flotsam and Jetsam
• The Voice of Saruman
• The Palantír

This is a clean cutoff because it finishes the Aragorn / Rohan / Ents / Isengard half before we switch back to Frodo and Sam.
A few questions already sitting in my head

• What does Boromir’s death do to the story? Is it redemption, tragedy, warning, or all three?
• Aragorn finally has to lead. Does he feel natural in that role, or is he still becoming the person everyone needs him to be?
• Merry and Pippin: when do they stop feeling like side characters? What changes them - danger, luck, friendship, or being underestimated?
• Treebeard and the Ents: are they comic relief, ancient grief, environmental rage, or Tolkien saying “the slowest people in the room may be the ones you should fear”?
• Rohan: what does this kingdom add to the world? Does it feel noble, fragile, tired, doomed, alive?
• Saruman’s voice: why is persuasion scarier here than brute force? What does Tolkien understand about people who make evil sound reasonable?
• Helm’s Deep: does the battle feel heroic, desperate, or just like people being cornered by history?

One question I really want us to wrestle with
When the Fellowship breaks, does the story become weaker because everyone is separated - or stronger because people finally reveal who they are without the group protecting them?
What the night will feel like
We’ll start with a quick round:
Who surprised you most in this section?
Then we’ll stay close to scenes and turning points - Boromir’s end, the chase, Fangorn, Théoden waking up, Helm’s Deep, Saruman talking, and that creepy little Palantír moment at the end.
No lore-flexing required.
No “who knows the appendices best.”
We’re reading the book as a living story about courage, manipulation, war, aging power, and what happens when ordinary people get pulled into events too large for them.

Going forward
If you like, bring one question you want to ask the room. I’ll bring questions, but I want to make space for questions from the Fellowship too.

When and where

🗓️ Date: Sat, June 20th
🕒 Time:e 12 PM
📍 Location: We are meeting on level 5 south side room in the library for Lord of the Rings today

Cap 13 + waitlist

I’m capping this at 13 again if I can. It was weirdly perfect.