From the Bookshelf of 2025 & 2026 Reading Challenge…

Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes

Start date: May 1, 2024

Finish date: May 31, 2024

Discussion: November 2025 Group Read

Why we're reading this: Group Read for May 2024
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November 2025 Group Read

The Travelling Cat Chronicles: Mid-Reading Discussion
By Winter , Group Reads · 3 posts · 21 views

last updated 21 hours, 44 min ago

The Travelling Cat Chronicles: Pre-Reading Discussion
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last updated Nov 02, 2025 10:43AM

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What Members Thought

Jan 18, 2018 Barbara rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, sci-fi-fantasy, classic, 2018-reads

This book was published in 1959, so many of the attitudes towards people who were "different" are not common today. Charlie is a man in his 30's with cognitive disabilities which were labeled mental retardation in that era. Modern readers may not realize that at the time he was a child, in the 1930's, many families. perhaps the majority, sent their children to state institutions where they stayed often for their entire lives. As a college student, I worked in the Fernald State School in Massachu ...more

14 likes · Like · see review

Jul 01, 2015 Booksdigger S rated it it was amazing

Shelves: loved-them, like-to-own

There are some books, that come along once in a lifetime and it leaves quite an impact on you and this book is one of such memorable book to me.

It's about a man named Charlie Gordon whose IQ soars from 68 to 185 turning him into a genius after experimental surgery to increase his intelligence. It's the first kind of surgery ever performed on humankind after successfully being performed on a mouse named Algernon. The story takes us through the moving rise and fall of Charlie Gordon's mental , em ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Jan 28, 2016 Megan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

It's always interesting to go back and read the original source of something that's seeped into general cultural knowledge. I knew the story going in, of course--there have been too many homages and parodies not to. But now I can see why so many people have riffed on it. The concept is interesting, of course, but the execution was even better. The change in writing style as Charlie went up and down the IQ scale was subtle but convincing. I really liked that Keyes avoided being preachy at all tur ...more

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