|
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 October: Roger Zelazny -- A Night in the Lonesome October November: John Gardner -- Grendel December: Christopher Moore -- The Stupidest Angel 2015: January: Italo Calvino -- Invisible Cities February: Karl Ove Knausgaard -- My Struggle: Book 1. March: Knut Hamsun -- Hunger April: Liu Cixin -- 三体 ( The Three-Body Problem) May: John Steinbeck -- Cannery Row June: Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood (Hiatus) August: Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Between the World and Me September: Wilkie Collins -- The Moonstone October:Seth Dickinson -- The Traitor Baru Cormorant [url=http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3749903]November:Svetlana Alexievich -- Voices from Chernobyl Current: Michael Chabon -- Gentlemen of the Road Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Gentlemen-Road-A-Tale-Adventure/dp/0345502078 quote:Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, sprang from an early passion for the derring-do and larger-than-life heroes of classic comic books. Now, once more mining the rich past, Chabon summons the rollicking spirit of legendary adventures–from The Arabian Nights to Alexandre Dumas to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories–in a wonderful new novel brimming with breathless action, raucous humor, cliff-hanging suspense, and a cast of colorful characters worthy of Scheherazade’s most tantalizing tales. quote:In Michael Chabon’s gleeful new novel, a pair of 10th-century soldiers of fortune scramble up and down the trails and gorges of the Caucasus, engaging in a brawl or a boondoggle as regularly as they pause for a meal. Zelikman, a blond European scarecrow whose heart has “turned to stone,” and Amram, a towering African, are apt if unlikely companions on the Silk Road’s shifting social terrain. Each has his pet passions — Zelikman for his hat and his horse, Amram for a sword called Mother-Defiler — and they bicker like the two leads in a buddy film, in this case bound together by the accident of birth that made them both Jewish. But atypically for Jews of the medieval era, they look for the main chance while swinging their blades right and left. quote:In an afterword, Chabon reveals that his original choice for the novel’s title was “Jews With Swords.” quote:In 2002, Michael Chabon edited a collection of retro-pulp stories titled McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, filled with stories by both literary writers and genre writers. I found it underwhelming. What grabbed me, though, was Chabon’s cri de couer for a return to plot in fiction. And in so doing he wanted writers to be able to use whatever genres they wanted to tell whatever stories they wanted, without fear of being dismissed as no longer writing “literature.” About the Author Michael Chabon (/ˈʃeɪbɒn/ shay-bon;[1] born May 24, 1963) is an American author.[2] Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus.[3] It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001 (see: 2001 in literature). His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards;[4][5][6] his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of that same year. Chabon's most recent novel, Telegraph Avenue, published in 2012 and billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch," concerns the tangled lives of two families in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the year 2004. His work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor[7] along with recurring themes, including nostalgia,[7] divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity.[3][8] He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work.[3][9] Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials. Discussion, Questions & Themes: I think there's a lot to look at here. It's Michael Chabon so a few themes are a given (homosexuality, jews) but he's in an unusual genre for him here. Pacing This one's short. Just Read, Then Post. References and Further Reading There are a lot of parallels with the Lankhmar books. 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!
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2015 14:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 22:43 |
|
|
If I really didn't like "The Yiddish Policemen's Union", because I didn't care about the plot and didn't understand a single Yiddish reference, will I also hate this book?
|
|
#
?
Dec 8, 2015 22:40
|
|
|
Walh Hara posted:If I really didn't like "The Yiddish Policemen's Union", because I didn't care about the plot and didn't understand a single Yiddish reference, will I also hate this book? I didn't read that one. This has an action based plot: swordfights, daring escapes, princesses, etc.. It really is very very close to a historical fiction version of Fritz Leiber' s Lankhmar books, except with Jewish protagonists, because Michael Chabon. Probably the least New-Yorker-Fiction thing of Chabon's that I've read. It is also fairly short. I'm not Jewish and I didn't feel like I was missing any major references. I suspect the historical setting mitigates that stuff. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Dec 9, 2015 |
|
#
?
Dec 9, 2015 03:58
|
|
|
First impressions: he seems to be doing 'bad on purpose' thing with his prose, which probably is a pastiche of some of the guys Hieronymus Alloy mentioned, whom I haven't read. it seems quite bizarre to somebody like me, who's uninitiated in the whole flowery pulp thing. The prose does have some grace in the rhythm and atmosphere, but I'm not sure if its enough for me - yet. I might grow to like it with time, tho. How are y'all finding Chabon's style in this one?
|
|
#
?
Dec 10, 2015 14:32
|
|
|
I didn't mind the style. I didn't make the pulp fiction connections you did, and thought it was just trying too hard, but it didn't distract from my enjoyment. Overall the book was WAY more swords and horses and less literary than I expected, but not in a bad way. I don't get where people are getting the gay themes though. I guess you could say that the protagonists' relationship had a tinge of romance about it, but not much more than your typical bromance fantasy.
|
|
#
?
Dec 11, 2015 05:29
|
|
|
Esme posted:I don't get where people are getting the gay themes though. I guess you could say that the protagonists' relationship had a tinge of romance about it, but not much more than your typical bromance fantasy. I've got this on my to-read list so might as well bump it up and read it this month; will share the impressions.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2015 19:57
|
|
|
Esme posted:
Partly yeah it's that every single Chabon book ever is about gay jews. The other half is that there's always an undercurrent of bromance in things like the Lankhmar books, and it felt like this book was playing with that convention by making it more explicit. I might have been looking for that & expecting it because of his other works though.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2015 20:37
|
|
|
Gentlemen of the Road is the third Chabon book I read, and by far the easiest and quickest read -- I got through it in a couple afternoons, although most of those afternoons was spent sitting on a bus with jet-lag so I did a lot of reading. It's not nearly as depressing as any other Chabon book I've read, either, which was kind of surprising because soul-crushing despair seems to be a common theme in his stuff. I really appreciate the setting -- there's very little cultural exposure to this entire region and time period. I don't know if I've ever read or watched any historical fiction that took place in the Eastern Roman Empire even, let alone a central/western Asian state neighboring it. I'm not sure how much of the book anyone else has read at this point, so I'll hold off with any further discussion, just wanted to chime in and say this is an enjoyable book 
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2015 20:33
|
|
|
I finished this and honestly wasn't impressed. I feel he emulated the extremely flowery style of the period extremely well - no small achievement in such a short book - but the story just didn't engage. Kavalier and Clay and Yiddish Policemen's Union (his only other books I've read) both had really strong stories that were firmly embedded in Jewish history/religion; Union in particular I found really evocative of being uprooted, lost, sticking to tradition because you don't really have anything else. I think he plays with the question of what it actually means to be a Jew with the way he presents the main characters here but it feels like going nowhere. The plot is fast and action-packed like a good swashbuckly romance should be, but ultimately failed in getting me interested; unless convinced that I missed something really crucial, I don't feel I'll be coming back to this one.
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2015 20:34
|
|
|
I finally did read it through to the end, and I'm less than impressed, too. The plot engaged me only rarely, the language seemed to bury everything in its muddy waters instead of providing an extra layer, and the theme of rootlessness never seemed to get off the ground. I admit that I wasn't reading it very closely - mostly in cafes and public transportation to wind down during some hectic days -, so maybe that's why I really didn't find much that went further than a very average adventure story with overly elaborate language.
|
|
#
?
Dec 27, 2015 20:29
|
|
|
suggestions for next month?
|
|
#
?
Dec 28, 2015 00:40
|
|
|
Man, I see I'm real late to this one, but I'm going to try and read it and post before the end of the month. Read Kavalier & Clay earlier this year and liked it, so while I see this had mixed reviews here, I'm interested.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2015 09:36
|
|
|
I had fun with it, though I agree that it often seemed overwritten (purposely so, I think.) I could see some similarities to The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson - a book I've been touting for a year now. Pillaging and raiding galore!
|
|
#
?
Dec 31, 2015 05:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 22:43 |
|
|
The Righteous Mind! Stunning book.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2016 00:30
|
|