“Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. ... Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?” - Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun For the past four summers, I’ve hosted a summer book club on my podcast, and I’m happy to say that I’ll be hosting it again this year— albeit in a slightly different form. So let me tell you a little about the book that I have chosen. This novel takes place in a not-too-distant future of polluted cities, human workforces rendered leisured and useless by machines, children looked after by robots, the looming prospect of singularity. Yet at the heart of this story is not horror but wonder. This is made possible by the novel’s narrator, Klara, a robotic AF (artificial friend) who looks after a girl (Josie) whose health is suffering after a procedure of genetic editing (lifting) to improve her IQ. Klara attends to the world with unbridled curiosity, and any knowledge gained serves her primary purpose: to care for a child. Klara notices everything, and speaks about it with simple poeticism, granting a surprising new perspective on life. This is a surprising, occasionally disturbing, and moving book. It is about technology, inequality, education, parenting, transhumanism, transcendence... I chose it because, unlike the other books I’ve chosen for this book club in the past, I felt moved but unresolved about his book— it brought up questions that I don’t have clear answers to, questions I wanted to explore with others, with you all. So I am excited to read this together! I’ll post more details about how the bookclub will run later, but for now: go acquire your book and start reading. More soon! x p.s. I wrote a short review about it for @ploughmag last year which you can read at the link in my profile.