Oasis San Antonio — Summer 2026 Book Discussion Group ·  Summer 2026

Book Discussion Group

This summer's reading group brings together a carefully selected collection of books spanning a wide variety of genres — biography and memoir, narrative non-fiction, and various forms of fiction to create a reading experience that is diverse, interesting, and meaningful. We begin with When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, the memoir of a brilliant neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal cancer at the height of his career, which asks us to confront what it truly means to be alive and how we define success and legacy. For the remaining books in our series, the group will have the opportunity to vote and choose the titles that speak most to them, making this truly a shared literary journey. My hope is that by sharing and discussing these books together, we will get much more out of them than we ever could individually.

Questions · Comments · Suggestions
4 BooksMay – August 2026San Antonio, Texas

This Season’s Reading

  1. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi — book cover
    Biography / Memoir

    When Breath Becomes Air

    Paul Kalanithi2016

    At the age of thirty-six and on the verge of completing his neurosurgery training, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles his transformation from medical student to neurosurgeon to patient, as he wrestles with what makes a life worth living in the face of death. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times #1 bestseller, this memoir is profound, life-affirming, and impossible to forget.

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    Discussion  ·  May 14

  2. Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson — book cover
    Non-Fiction

    Isaac's Storm

    Erik Larson1999

    On September 8, 1900, a massive hurricane slammed into Galveston, Texas — then one of the most prosperous cities in America — killing an estimated 8,000 people in what remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. At the center of the story is Isaac Cline, the city's chief meteorologist, who dismissed warnings of the approaching storm. Drawing on diaries, letters, and official records, Erik Larson reconstructs the fateful hours before landfall and the terrifying night that followed. A masterwork of narrative nonfiction, Isaac's Storm is a tale of hubris, nature's fury, and the human cost of ignoring the evidence before us.

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    Discussion  ·  June 11

  3. First Principles by Thomas E. Ricks — book cover
    Non-Fiction / History

    First Principles

    Thomas E. Ricks2020

    In First Principles, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas E. Ricks examines how America's Founding Fathers were shaped by their deep immersion in classical antiquity. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were all steeped in the history, philosophy, and rhetoric of ancient Greece and Rome — and Ricks argues this classical education profoundly shaped the ideals and structures they built into the new republic. Drawing on the founders' own writings and the ancient texts they studied, First Principles offers a fresh and illuminating perspective on the intellectual origins of American democracy.

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    Discussion  ·  July 9

  4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick — book cover
    Science Fiction

    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

    Philip K. Dick1968

    In a post-apocalyptic 1992, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is tasked with hunting down six escaped androids that have fled to Earth from off-world colonies. As Deckard tracks his targets through a decaying, radioactive San Francisco, he grapples with what separates authentic human empathy from artificial imitation — a distinction that grows harder to draw with each android he retires. Alongside his story runs that of John Isidore, a lonely, mentally impaired human who harbors two of the fugitives. Blending noir detective fiction with philosophical science fiction, Philip K. Dick's classic novel — the basis for the film Blade Runner — asks unsettling questions about consciousness, identity, and what it truly means to be alive.

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    Discussion  ·  August 13