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Welcome earthlings to the Awful Book of the Month! In this thread, we choose one work of Resources: Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org - A database of over 17000 books available online. If you can suggest books from here, that'd be the best. SparkNotes - http://www.sparknotes.com/ - A very helpful Cliffnotes-esque site, but much better, in my opinion. If you happen to come in late and need to catch-up, you can get great character/chapter/plot summaries here.  For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM me. Past Books of the Month 2011: January: John Keats, Endymion Febuary/March: Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote April: Laurell K. Hamilton, Obsidian Butterfly May: Richard A. Knaak - Diablo #1: Legacy of Blood June: Pamela Britton - On The Move July: Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep August: Louis L'Amour - Bendigo Shafter September: Ian Fleming - Moonraker October: Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes November: John Ringo - Ghost December: James Branch Cabell - Jurgen 2012: January: G.K. Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday Febuary: M. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage March: Joseph Heller - Catch-22 April: Zack Parsons - Liminal States May: Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood June: James Joyce - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man July: William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch August: William Faulkner - The Sound & The Fury September/October: Leo Tolstoy - War & Peace November: David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas December: Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night 2013 January: Walter M. Miller - A Canticle for Liebowitz Febuary: Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination March: Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains Of The Day April: Don Delillo - White Noise May: Anton LeVey - The Satanic Bible June/July: Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell August: Michael Swanwick - Stations of the Tide September: John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids October: Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House November: Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory December: Roderick Thorp - Nothing Lasts Forever 2014: January: Ursula K. LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness February: Mikhail Bulgalov - Master & Margarita March: Richard P. Feynman -- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! April: James Joyce -- Dubliners May: Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- 100 Years of Solitude June: Howard Zinn -- A People's History of the United States July: Mary Renault -- The Last of the Wine August: Barbara Tuchtman -- The Guns of August September: Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice Current: Roger Zelazny: A Night in the Lonesome October  You can find it on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Night-Lonesome-October-Roger-Zelazny/dp/1935138294 quote:I am a watchdog. My name is Snuff. I live with my master Jack outside of London now. I like Soho very much at night with its smelly fogs and dark streets. It is silent then and we go for long walks. Jack is under a curse from a long time ago and must do much of his work at night to keep worse things from happening. I keep watch while he is about it. If someone comes, I howl. That's the opening paragraph of this book. It's perfect. It's fun and it tells you everything you really need to know about what we're getting into. The book is thirty-one chapters long, one for every day in the month of October. Jack is exactly who you think he is, but in a way he's also the protagonist and hero; this will be explained. This is a pastiche novel, and other characters will include The Great Detective, the Mad Monk, The Count, the Good Doctor, and several more. Snuff narrates. It's a fun book and a personal favorite of mine and it's light and silly Halloween fun. It's excellently written and perfectly unserious. It was one of Zelazny's last novels, the Master just jazzing around and playing with literary and fantasy conventions. I'm sure we can all use a break. Let's have fun with this one. About the Author quote:Roger Joseph Zelazny (May 13, 1937 – June 14, 1995) was an American writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels, best known for his The Chronicles of Amber series. He won the Nebula award three times (out of 14 nominations) and the Hugo award six times (also out of 14 nominations), including two Hugos for novels: the serialized novel ...And Call Me Conrad (1965; subsequently published under the title This Immortal, 1966) and then the novel Lord of Light (1967).[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Zelazny Zelazny is probably my favorite SF writer. While he has common themes that run through most of his work, just about every book he wrote was an experiment, sometimes with genre, sometimes with form, sometimes with style. (The only real exception is with his Amber books, which I'm convinced were deliberate potboilers written for cash, and aren't on the same level as his other work). Discussion, Questions & Themes: This is fun month. Speak as thou wilt is the whole of the law! (all forum rules still apply). Seriously though I'm just going to leave discussion wide open. Say what you like or hate or don't or whatever, what the book reminded you of that happened that one time, or anything that relates in any way to any of the pastiche characters in this book or, for that matter, hell, any of Zelazny's other works too. Further Resources: No need to do outside reading this month unless you want to. Neil Gaiman did write a "sequel" to this novel set in the same world, "Only the End of the World Again," but I haven't read it. Pacing Some people like to read a chapter a day. You can if you want to. Maybe use spoiler tags if you're talking about events in the book in a later chapter than the day -- i.e., since today is the 2nd, no tags required for Chapters 1&2, but spoiler any big plot revelations in chapters after that. When we hit Day 20, only need to spoiler chapters 21& up. So forth. Final Note: If you have any suggestions to change, improve or assess the book club generally, please PM or email me -- i.e., keep it out of this thread -- at least until into the last five days of the month, just so we don't derail discussion of the current book with meta-discussion. I do want to hear new ideas though, seriously, so please do actually PM or email me or whatever, or if you can't do either of those things, just hold that thought till the last five days of the month before posting it in this thread. Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Oct 2, 2014 |
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Oct 2, 2014 15:38
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Ms. Happiness posted:No ebook version? Arg! I apologize! I didn't think to check this month, and after some googling around it seems that there aren't any legal ebook copies of his works available and most of his stuff is out of print period, apparently because the rights got confused after his death and he also falls into that void where's he's just forgotten enough to be not worth reviving yet still recent enough to have not dropped out of copyright. There is a downloadable audiobook here, read by Zelazny himself: http://speakingvolumes.mybigcommerce.com/a-night-in-the-lonesome-october-by-roger-zelazny-mp3-audiobook-download/
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Oct 7, 2014 14:30
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Hedningen posted:"He sounds like an accountant" is the way my wife put it when we tried to use the Amber audiobooks to make it through a long car ride. Dude can write a great turn of phrase, but has the voice of a heavily-smoking bureaucrat. That's surprisingly accurate. Zelazny worked for the social security administration before he quit his day job. I've read a rumour that Creatures of Light and Darkness was loosely inspired by feuding departments.
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Oct 7, 2014 18:32
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ulmont posted:A Night in the Lonesome October is very different from Lord of Light or Amber or Jack of Shadows, as an FYI. Yeah, I really can't emphasize that enough -- all of Zelazny's best works are very different from each other. Lord of Light is narrated in a sort of quasi-biblical, quasi-buddhist style that's heavily influenced by Indian religious texts, while in Creatures of Light and Darkness almost every other chapter is written in a different genre and format (epic poem, lyric poem, religious service, play, etc.). I do recommend trying his other stuff (especially Lord of Light and The Isle of the Dead) but he never wrote anything else quite like the one we're reading now, it's a one-off masterpiece. Shame, really. I wish he'd lived longer and written a board game version. It'd be amazing.
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Oct 8, 2014 19:07
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Also, I should've known this right off, but the title is a Poe quotation:quote:
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/ulalume While I was trying to track down the source of the title I also ran across this: quote:I got the idea for that story in May of 1979. I didn't know what it was going to be; I just thought it would be neat to write something about Jack the Ripper's dog, and ask Gahan Wilson to illustrate it, partly because of the fact that a dog is such an unusual person. No matter who owns a dog, if that person is nice to the animal, the dog is going to love him. I thought at the time, if you take a really despicable person, a serial killer or someone like that, and tell a story from his dog's point of view it would make him look pretty good. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roger_Zelazny
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Oct 8, 2014 19:40
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Don't read these spoilers if you haven't finished the book! Well, with Larry Talbot, think about it: He's an American, he's a Werewolf, and he's in London. Alternatively, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Talbot. The Mad Monk is probably more closely modeled on Rasputin. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Oct 12, 2014 |
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Oct 12, 2014 23:17
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Here are some interesting discussion pages and articles on this book. They contain pretty significant spoilers so only read them if you've finished: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/07/humorous-exposition-roger-zelaznys-a-night-in-the-lonesome-october http://www.unwinnable.com/2012/10/29/roger-zelaznys-a-night-in-the-lonesome-october/ This one especially has some really subtle details (some of which may be a bit of a stretch): http://lovecraftzine.com/magazine/i...opher-s-kovacs/ Somebody did try to do a game it looks like but it seems incredibly cumbersome: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct....77648437,d.cWc The way to do it would be as a board game with a card deck for relics and items of power, everyone gets a face-down card only they see that tells them what team they're on, and a catan-style shuffleable gameboard.
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Oct 20, 2014 15:38
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Oh! Time for suggestions for next month's BotM. I'm completely out of ideas.
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Oct 24, 2014 13:00
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Ms. Happiness posted:Somebody mentioned American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I wouldn't mind reading that again. I'm hesitant to select American Gods because it's very popular modern genre fantasy and thus something that most people on this forum have probably read already. I want the BotM to go at least slightly off the beaten path. Plus, we just did archetype-based fantasy by a white male author this month. Gaiman's work is really heavily influenced by Zelazny's and two months in a row of that seems like a rut.
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Oct 24, 2014 20:02
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Crashbee posted:
Hahaha, what? Seriously? And nobody pointed that out? When? Sharp as tacks I am! :P Normally I'm not going to want to repeat things but I guess if nobody even realizes we're repeating then it's not that big a deal.
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Oct 25, 2014 01:35
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xcheopis posted:Perhaps something by Robertson Davies? What specific title would you recommend?
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Oct 26, 2014 17:31
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The significant other has informed me that we have a copy of "Murther & Walking Spirits." Is that one good?
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Oct 26, 2014 20:19
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Wade Wilson posted:What about Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves? That's a good suggestion but I've already got five on the list and the poll is up for next month, so remind me again in 25 days or so! As to your other two selections they're both fun books and I've been recommending them to friends, but I'm generally hesitant to choose recently-published SF & F for the BotM, just because we have so many threads for that stuff already it seems unnecessary. I feel like (and maybe this is something worth debating and talking about!) part of the role of the BotM should be to highlight stuff the average goon would like, but hasn't read yet -- expanding goon horizons etc. So to my mind that rules out most genre fiction, especially if it's in a genre we have ongoing threads about (and Paul Cornell's stuff is frequently discussed in the Dresden Files thread, which is sortof the de facto urban fantasy thread on the forum). So much of the forum is weighted towards SF & F that I feel like I should set a higher bar for those genres than for other suggestions. With that in mind, what I'm looking for in a SF&F nominee for BotM is that it be some combination of esoteric, unique, and forgotten or ignored, along with some kind of significant artistic merit. The Gods Themselves, like this month's selection, might be a good choice as you say because even though it's by a major author it's "off the beaten path" and several decades old. On the other hand, something like, say, Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Chronicles might not be that good a choice though because even though it's something of a "lost gem" / "forgotten favorite" and has some interesting features at heart it's basically a generic medieval fantasy novel and not something I'm going to ask the whole forum to slog through. Similarly, Ringworld would be a bad choice because almost everyone's already read it. Canticle for Liebowitz might be a judgment call -- it's definitely got strong literary merit but I think most people have already been exposed to it (but I could be wrong, which is one reason I do the polling). Does all that make sense? Do people think all that sounds reasonable, or is this a policy that I should consider changing?
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Oct 28, 2014 22:22
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Beyond sane knolls posted:As Meat Loves Salt is neither SF nor F! That'd be a great suggestion! Remind me of it in twenty days or so =)
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Oct 29, 2014 05:21
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Well, I hope everyone liked the book! For November, it's Grendel.
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Nov 3, 2014 00:58
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