Hey hey, Sickos! The November poll for the History Sickos Book Clubs will be live later today, and I'm going full dictator mode for the Fiction Sickos for reasons I will explain in a moment. You can go vote on the History poll in the appropriate Discord channels (scroll down #history-vote). The poll will run for 72 hours so get your vote in ASAP.

If you're not seeing the book club channels, make sure you've linked your Bindery subscription to Discord via the Account Settings page. Those vote/discussion channels unlock at the Sicko plus paid tiers, so if you're a "Follower", you'll need to upgrade. Along with the book club forums you also get access to a ton of other channels for various genres, book recommendation requests, movies/TV, buddy reads and much more.

DEAR LEADERS' FICTION BOOK CLUB PICK

There's an author who has been so generous with their time with me and it's time for me to do 'em a solid. If you've seen the finished copy of the A Complement of Scoundrels paperback (and if you haven't, wtf), you possibly noticed the blurb from John Gwynne on the cover. It's obviously a huge score to have such a respected author like Papa Gwynne call your imprint's first novel "beautifully constructed" on the cover. On top of that, I really want to read this new doggone book of his, so in November we are reading...

THE WOLVES OF WAR by JOHN GWYNNE (WOLFHEART CHRONICLES #1)

Here's the summary for it:

The Clans once lived freely, honouring their gods and traditions. Then the northern invaders unleashed a tide of blood and fire. Now the Clans are a conquered people.
Ivan cares not for wars or kings. His only concern is the safety of his family, especially his daughter Halia, whom he would protect with his life. Halia has been trapped in her own body since birth, yet at night she has dreams of running with wolves and speaking with fae creatures of the forest. Many believe her cursed, but Halia's awakening powers may be the only way she and her family can survive the coming storm.
For the wolves of war are stalking the horizon. Two princes have become mortal enemies, and an iron-toothed witch haunts the shadows. As mighty nations clash, Halia must master her strange magic to protect those she loves. To do so, she must accept a terrifying truth.
Sometimes, the only way through the darkness is to embrace it.

HISTORY SICKOS BOOK CLUB OPTIONS

And here are the four history book options we have to choose from this round...

Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld by Andrew Rankin

"... the first comprehensive history of the yakuza, from their emergence out of seventeenth-century samurai gang culture to the present day... Featuring a lively cast of extortionists, smugglers, hit men, and corporate crime lords, Yakuza is a fascinating tour of Japan’s sprawling mob syndicates and the cultural traditions with which they are so deeply intertwined."

River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads by Cat Jarman

An acclaimed bioarchaeologist, Catrine Jarman has used cutting-edge forensic techniques to spark her investigation into the history of the Vikings who came to rest in British soil... Told as a riveting history of the Vikings and the methods we use to understand them, this is a major reassessment of the fierce, often-mythologized voyagers of the North—and of the global medieval world as we know it.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land... Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortizoffers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire... Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative."

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list... Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander’s unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

Happy voting, Sickos!