BOTM POLL: S S S SEPTEMBEEEER

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > BOTM POLL: S S S SEPTEMBEEEER

Choose! This poll is closed.
Lincoln in the Bardo	6	30.00%
The Peregrine	9	45.00%
Scaramouche	3	15.00%
Warlock	2	10.00%
Total:	14 votes

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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

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Sanders

quote:

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln�s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. �My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,� the president says at the time. �God has called him home.� Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy�s body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state�called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo�a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie�s soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction�s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?

Franchescanado posted:

tl;dr - Willie Lincoln dies and hangs out in a graveyard with a bunch of ghosts stuck in the graveyard because their yearning for life is too strong to let them move on. Willie refuses to move on because he is waiting for his father to visit. It is unusual for a child's soul to linger, but Willie has a strong soul and becomes a curiosity to the other ghosts. The style's a little experimental, there are multiple (sometimes contradicting) narrators (almost all of them ghosts), we go in and out of the stories of the ghosts and the supernatural trials and tribulations of the graveyard (angels/demons, the inability to leave, the corporeal state dictated by how you died, etc), and there are digressions about life, death, loss, sorrow, beauty, love, and everything in between. It's funny, it's weird, it's creative as hell, it's new and common, and it's a really good quick read.

The Peregrine by J.A. Baker.

quote:

From fall to spring, J.A. Baker set out to track the daily comings and goings of a pair of peregrine falcons across the flat fen lands of eastern England. He followed the birds obsessively, observing them in the air and on the ground, in pursuit of their prey, making a kill, eating, and at rest, activities he describes with an extraordinary fusion of precision and poetry. And as he continued his mysterious private quest, his sense of human self slowly dissolved, to be replaced with the alien and implacable consciousness of a hawk.

quote:

tl;dr - This is a beautiful weird book that's been gaining some popularity in the Lit. Thread. It's short, around 200 pages, and despite the summary being short, there's a lot to discuss in it. Werner Herzog loves it.

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

quote:

Scaramouche is an historical novel by Rafael Sabatini, originally published in 1921. A romantic adventure, Scaramouche tells the story of a young lawyer during the French Revolution.[1] In the course of his adventures he becomes an actor portraying "Scaramouche" (a roguish buffoon character in the commedia dell'arte). He also becomes a revolutionary, politician, and fencing-master, confounding his enemies with his powerful orations and swordsmanship. He is forced by circumstances to change sides several times. The book also depicts his transformation from cynic to idealist.

The three-part novel opens with the memorable line: "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." This line was to become Sabatini's epitaph, on his gravestone in Adelboden, Switzerland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaramouche_(novel)

Warlock by Oakley Hall

Thomas Pynchon posted:

]
Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisedell who, partly because of his blown-up image in the Wild West magazines of the day, believes he is a hero. He is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist. It is Blaisedell's private abyss, and not too different from the town's public one. Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with -- the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power -- the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

Three days or so to vote. You can vote for more than one, but if you vote for a book, and it is selected, please participate in the discussion!

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Aug 30, 2017

# ? Aug 30, 2017 04:04

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# ? Apr 24, 2024 17:38

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 PEREGRINE wins

I'll get up a thread soonish, gotten distracted by reports etc

# ? Sep 4, 2017 06:32

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > BOTM POLL: S S S SEPTEMBEEEER