July 2019 BOTM -- POLL POLL POLL VOOOOOTE (early and often)

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > July 2019 BOTM -- POLL POLL POLL VOOOOOTE (early and often)

choose poorly; three days only! This poll is closed.
1) You Can't Win by Jack Black	3	17.65%
2) The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (The Princeton History of the Ancient World)	0	0%
3) The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson	3	17.65%
4) The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach	6	35.29%
5) What I Saw in America by G.K. Chesterton	5	29.41%
Total:	15 votes

[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Vote for next month's BOTM. You can vote for more than one, but please only vote if you plan on participating: part of the purpose of the poll is an interest check.

1) You Can't Win by Jack Black

quote:

You Can't Win is an autobiography by burglar and hobo Jack Black, written in the early to mid-1920s and first published in 1926. It describes Black's life on the road, in prison and his various criminal capers in the American and Canadian west from the late 1880s to early 20th century. The book was a major influence upon William S. Burroughs and other Beat writers. It was made into a film in 2015.

quote:

My background is crowded with robberies, burglaries, and thefts too numerous to recall. All manner of crimes against property. Arrests, trials, acquittals, convictions, escapes. Penitentiaries! I see in the background four of them. County jails, workhouses, city prisons, Mounted Police barracks, dungeons, solitary confinement, bread and water, hanging up, brutal floggings, and the murderous straitjacket. I see hop joints, wine dumps, thieves' resorts, and beggars' hangouts. Crime followed by swift retribution in one form or another. I had very few glasses of wine as I traveled this route. I rarely saw a woman smile and seldom heard a song. In those twenty-five years I took all these things, and I am going to write about them. And I am going to write about them as I took them - with a smile.

2) The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (The Princeton History of the Ancient World)

quote:

Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome�s power―a story of nature�s triumph over human ambition.

Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes readers from Rome�s pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted. Harper describes how the Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a �little ice age� and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague.

A poignant reflection on humanity�s intimate relationship with the environment, The Fate of Rome provides a sweeping account of how one of history�s greatest civilizations encountered and endured, yet ultimately succumbed to the cumulative burden of nature�s violence. The example of Rome is a timely reminder that climate change and germ evolution have shaped the world we inhabit―in ways that are surprising and profound.

3) The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson

quote:

The Night Land is a horror novel by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. As a work of fantasy it belongs to the Dying Earth subgenre. Hodgson also published a much shorter version of the novel, entitled The Dream of X (1912).

H. P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" describes the novel as "one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written". Clark Ashton Smith wrote of it that "In all literature, there are few works so sheerly remarkable, so purely creative, as The Night Land. Whatever faults this book may possess, however inordinate its length may seem, it impresses the reader as being the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness. Only a great poet could have conceived and written this story; and it is perhaps not illegitimate to wonder how much of actual prophecy may have been mingled with the poesy."[1]

When the book was written, the nature of the energy source that powers stars was not known: Lord Kelvin had published calculations based on the hypothesis that the energy came from the gravitational collapse of the gas cloud that had formed the sun and found that this mechanism gave the Sun a lifetime of only a few tens of million of years. Starting from this premise, Hodgson wrote a novel describing a time, millions of years in the future, when the Sun has gone dark.[2]

4) The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Franchescanado posted:

It's $3 on Kindle right now.

It's about a baseball prodigy who loses his ability to play, and is in danger of losing his scholarship at Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, who's team is named The Harpooners, in honour of Herman Melville. One of the plot-lines involves a man who's lived his entire life as heterosexual coming out for the first time.

So, it's a book all about the artistry of baseball, but doesn't require baseball knowledge, making it fun and appropriate during baseball season. It's literary without being insular. It has LGBQT+ plotlines and themes around Pride month. It's all about exploring talent, creativity, masculinity, depression, and existential dread. It's well-written and gripping.

All-around great book.

5) What I Saw in America by G.K. Chesterton

quote:

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labor and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger--the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel.

# ? Jun 27, 2019 15:15

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 02:52

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

if you have other suggestions post them below

# ? Jun 27, 2019 15:16

CestMoi: Sep 16, 2011

its gk chesterton time baby

# ? Jun 27, 2019 20:50

Ben Nevis: Jan 20, 2011

I voted Art of Fielding, it's been on my list for awhile and a book challenge this year is a sports book, so...

# ? Jun 27, 2019 20:51

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

Fate of Rome to compliment the Tacitus im reading rn

When I read The Night Land it took me like 6 months to drag myself through it. neat book tho.

# ? Jun 27, 2019 21:15

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

I feel like I didn't sell You Can't Win well enough

it was a huge influence on William Burroughs

https://donherron.com/rediscovered-you-cant-win/

# ? Jun 29, 2019 02:53

Ben Nevis: Jan 20, 2011

I totally thought it was the other Jack Black.

# ? Jun 29, 2019 03:51

Franchescanado: Feb 23, 2013; If it wasn't for disappointment
I wouldn't have any appointment; Grimey Drawer

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I feel like I didn't sell You Can't Win well enough

it was a huge influence on William Burroughs

https://donherron.com/rediscovered-you-cant-win/

It's been on my to-read list for a while! If I didn't put my own book rec in the fight, I'd have voted for it. Make it next month?

# ? Jun 30, 2019 15:08

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 02:52

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

ok, we'll go with Art of Fielding

I'll try to get a thread up today

# ? Jul 1, 2019 16:04

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > July 2019 BOTM -- POLL POLL POLL VOOOOOTE (early and often)