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Welcome goonlings 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 [for BOTM before 2016, refer to archives] 2016: January: Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome February:The March Up Country (The Anabasis) of Xenophon March: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco April: Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling May: Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima June:The Vegetarian by Han Kang July:Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees August: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov September:Siddhartha by Herman Hesse October:Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse November:Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain December: It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis 2017: January: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut February: The Plague by Albert Camus March: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin April: The Conference of the Birds (مقامات الطیور) by Farid ud-Din Attar May: I, Claudius by Robert Graves June: Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky July: Ficcionies by Jorge Luis Borges August: My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber September: The Peregrine by J.A. Baker October: Blackwater Vol. I: The Flood by Michael McDowell November: Aquarium by David Vann December: Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight [Author Unknown] 2018 January: Njal's Saga [Author Unknown] February: The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle March: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders April: Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria May: Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov June: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe July: Warlock by Oakley Hall August: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriott September: The Magus by John Fowles October: I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara November: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard December: Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens 2019: January: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky February: BEAR by Marian Engel March: V. by Thomas Pynchon April: The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout May: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman June: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann July: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach August: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay September:Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay October: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado November: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett December: Moby Dick by Herman Melville 2020: January: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Current: WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin  Book available in the following locations: https://archive.org/details/Wes-sweggy/mode/2up (Free, newly out of copyright original 1924 English translation by Gregory Zilboorg) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07X7JNVPM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 (Modern, unabridged translation by Natasha Randall) About the book: quote:‘The best single work of science fiction yet written’ We is the first great progenitor of the twentieth-century dystopian novel. quote:Written in 1921, WE is a novel before its time. It is often compared to Orwell's "1984" (written in 1949) and Huxley's "Brave New World" (written in 1932). Orwell, who started writing "1984" eight months after having read a translation of "We", acknowledged the influence of Zamyatin's novel. He further said that Huxley too must have been influenced by it, although Huxley denied it; still, Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing "Player Piano" he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of 'Brave New World', whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'We'." quote:First published in the Soviet 1920s, Zamyatin's dystopic novel left an indelible watermark on 20th-century culture, from Orwell's 1984 to Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil. Randall's exciting new translation strips away the Cold War connotations and makes us conscious of Zamyatin's other influences, from Dostoyevski to German expressionism. D-503 is a loyal "cipher" of the totalitarian One State, literally walled in by glass; he is a mathematician happily building the world's first rocket, but his life is changed by meeting I-330, a woman with "sharp teeth" who keeps emerging out of a sudden vampirish dusk to smile wickedly on the poor narrator and drive him wild with desire. (When she first forces him to drink alcohol, the mind leaps to Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.) In becoming a slave to love, D-503 becomes, briefly, a free man. In Randall's hands, Zamyatin's modernist idiom crackles ("I only remember his fingers: they flew out of his sleeve, like bundles of beams"), though the novel sometimes seems prophetic of the onset of Stalinism, particularly in the bleak ending. quote:There's a really good sci-fi yarn called We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, that I'd recommend. (Don't bother with any translation but Natasha Randall's.) About the Author(s) quote:
quote:Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, Tambov Governorate, 300 km (186 mi) south of Moscow. His father was a Russian Orthodox priest and schoolmaster, and his mother a musician. In a 1922 essay, Zamyatin recalled, "You will see a very lonely child, without companions of his own age, on his stomach, over a book, or under the piano, on which his mother is playing Chopin."[2] quote:Zamyatin, who died in Paris in 1937, was a Russian novelist and critic who published a number of books both before and after the Revolution. We was written about 1923, and though it is not about Russia and has no direct connection with contemporary politics—it is a fantasy dealing with the twenty-sixth century A.D.—it was refused publication on the ground that it was ideologically undesirable. A copy of the manuscript found its way out of the country, and the book has appeared in English, French and Czech translations, but never in Russian. The English translation was published in the United States, and I have never been able to procure a copy: but copies of the French translation (the title is Nous Autres) do exist, and I have at last succeeded in borrowing one. So far as I can judge it is not a book of the first order, but it is certainly an unusual one, and it is astonishing that no English publisher has been enterprising enough to re-issue it. [/quote] Themes quote:
quote:the issue of Zamyatin’s female characters. Not something Orwell is likely to have spent too much time mulling over back in 1946. The two main female ‘numbers’ — all characters in the world of We are numbers rather than named individuals, an idea that might seem cliché now, but which, in 1921, predated the Holocaust by some twenty years — represent a form of good and evil, the homely vs. the wicked, the mother/wife vs. the temptress/mistress. As tiring as this is, like all good lady readers, I excuse Mr. Zamyatin time and again for his context, his upbringing, and so on and so forth. But by page 33’s ‘You women Numbers! You’re so prejudiced it’s hopeless.’ and ‘Just like a woman!’ I had well and truly had enough of it. And that’s not to even get started on the (male) poet character (who at least has a vocation) with the ‘disgusting African lips’. It’s uncomfortable reading, and leads me to spend a large part of the novel wondering what our duty should be surrounding art of yore: where does it belong? How should it be contextualised? Where and when should it be saved? quote:Take the lines, ‘walls are the basis of everything human,’ and ‘Man ceased to be a wild animal when he built the first wall,’ which, from the wobbly vantage point of politics today allows a caustic, knowing snort to creep out onto the page. https://storgy.com/2018/12/22/book-review-we-by-yevgeny-zamyatin/ Pacing Read as thou wilt is the whole of the law. Please post after you read! Please bookmark the thread to encourage discussion. References and Further Materials Suggestions for Future Months These threads aren't just for discussing the current BOTM; If you have a suggestion for next month's book, please feel free to post it in the thread below also. Generally what we're looking for in a BotM are works that have 1) accessibility -- either easy to read or easy to download a free copy of, ideally both 2) novelty -- something a significant fraction of the forum hasn't already read 3) discussability -- intellectual merit, controversiality, insight -- a book people will be able to talk about. Final Note: Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book!
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Feb 4, 2020 12:32
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For real, only read the new translation. The original can just be incomprehensible.
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Feb 4, 2020 16:35
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I'm going to have to read this again...I last read it over 20 years ago for a college class on the history of science fiction, and I remember absolutely nothing about it.
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Feb 4, 2020 18:16
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Action Jacktion posted:For real, only read the new translation. The original can just be incomprehensible. The most widely available translations right now are the Ginsburg (1972), Brown (1993), Randall (2006), and Aplin (2009) versions, all of which are good except the Brown. Edit: I hadn't taken too close a look at the Aplin before, but it is very good. I will have to get it as soon as I can. Shame about the cover's dumb Metropolis schtick, though. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Feb 4, 2020 |
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Feb 4, 2020 22:47
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Yay, it only took me twenty minutes to find my copy and it IS the Randall version Knew I had a copy just hadn't gotten around to actually reading it myself yet
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Feb 5, 2020 02:33
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book is currently a buck on Amazon Kindle https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ABQ0LJS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
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Feb 5, 2020 03:17
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GreyjoyBastard posted:book is currently a buck on Amazon Kindle This is translated by Clarence Brown it looks like.
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Feb 5, 2020 03:51
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:This is translated by Clarence Brown it looks like. well i guess that's why it's a dollar
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Feb 5, 2020 07:17
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:This is translated by Clarence Brown it looks like. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Feb 5, 2020 |
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Feb 5, 2020 17:14
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The Randall translation is $1.24 on kindle for me at the moment, I just bought it
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Feb 5, 2020 21:19
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I totally want to read this! Thanks for the translation tips. Need. To. Finish. Current. Book!
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Feb 5, 2020 22:31
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:The Randall translation is $1.24 on kindle for me at the moment, I just bought it link? Sham bam bamina! posted:Not even. Brown is listed on the page, and the blurb uses his "OneState", but it's the Zilboorg translation. A dollar is overpaying, not in terms of quality but simply because it's a public-domain ebook. Yeah, a few years back amazon started merging reviews and pages for different editions, which can really gently caress up trying to find the right edition in translation.
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Feb 6, 2020 01:53
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, a few years back amazon started merging reviews and pages for different editions, which can really gently caress up trying to find the right edition in translation.
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Feb 6, 2020 02:47
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The one from your OP
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Feb 6, 2020 07:18
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Sham bam bamina! posted:There are many translations, and the Zilboorg translation from 1924 is not "the original", which would be the Russian source. I pretty obviously meant the original translation. I know this is the internet but we don't have to be so nitpicky.
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Feb 6, 2020 19:31
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Action Jacktion posted:I pretty obviously meant the original translation. I know this is the internet but we don't have to be so nitpicky. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Feb 6, 2020 |
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Feb 6, 2020 19:35
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I read it. its good. reads like an Expressionist painting zblboorb translates "benefactor" as "Well-Doer" which is.. an odd decision
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Feb 6, 2020 20:02
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just finished the Randall translation. really interesting to see Zamyatin’s extrapolations to the endpoints of Fordism and Taylorism in regards to the dehumanization of its workers. want to revisit Brave New World and 1984 to really see the through lines and threads that started here.
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Feb 12, 2020 05:10
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I, a novice reader, read this book since it was selected here and it was pretty short. Unfortunately, I found sections in the final third (from the Integral test flight on) tough to follow. As far as I understood, the test flight takes place but the planned takeover of the ship does not because the Mephi were betrayed to the secret police? Can someone confirm/correct this and maybe elaborate on why? I understand that the book is more about its themes and social commentary than about the minutiae of the plot but this was something that took me out of it somewhat regardless.
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Feb 13, 2020 08:41
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Incessant Excess posted:I, a novice reader, read this book since it was selected here and it was pretty short. Unfortunately, I found sections in the final third (from the Integral test flight on) tough to follow. As far as I understood, the test flight takes place but the planned takeover of the ship does not because the Mephi were betrayed to the secret police? Can someone confirm/correct this and maybe elaborate on why? this is from what I understood: U has been reading D-503’s journals and tips off the Guardians to the takeover plot. she doesn’t directly implicate D-503 or I-330 because she is afraid that if she did, D-503 wouldn’t want to be with her (disregarding the fact that D-503 wants to kill her for this but stops). D-503 then gets taken to the Benefactor because he tried to suicide the Integral (and was stopped by the Second Builder).
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Feb 13, 2020 17:28
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Very helpful, thanks!
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Feb 14, 2020 17:27
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Finally able to dig into this. Seven records in and it's weird. I like it. Oh no, a cloud. How dare it. It's unfortunate that I was unable to find a hard copy of this anywhere. I grabbed the $1.30 kindle edition which I am unsure who translated it. It refers to The United State and does have Well-Doer. Philthy fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Feb 14, 2020 |
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Feb 14, 2020 21:58
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Philthy posted:Finally able to dig into this. Seven records in and it's weird. I like it. that's the one i read and i liked it well enough
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Feb 14, 2020 22:04
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This is such a great book so far. It's a mix of dreamlike expressions and half reality. Everything was so clear at the beginning and as you progress you start to realize nothing was clear at all, you were under water and you need out. You need to breathe. I love this style of writing. I would love to see illustrated versions of this, or maybe an animated take on this in the style of René Laloux's Fantastic Planet.
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Feb 15, 2020 21:14
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I got this from the library but unfortunately it was the bad Clancy Brown translation lol. Maybe I will try to grab the updated translation when I return this one. That being said I did like the book. Definitely agree with the idea that it's very expressionistic, and I liked the narrator occasionally catching himself and being like "oh I keep forgetting you wouldn't necessarily know wtf I am talking about here let me explain" and then that explanation recontextualizes earlier scenes. Also Huxley is full of poo poo he obviously read this
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Feb 18, 2020 19:52
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Need nominations for next month.
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Feb 25, 2020 02:03
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Need nominations for next month. hello, i will reiterate that think it should be north american lake monsters, although i will admit a mediocre track record in “recommending horror short story collections that i think will generate lots of discussion”
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Feb 26, 2020 06:51
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or dead souls, make everybody read dead souls
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Feb 26, 2020 06:56
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"Dead souls" might be the best novel ever. However, I nominate Symposium by Plato.
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Feb 27, 2020 15:20
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Need nominations for next month. How about something from the list of books that left copyright this year? Otherwise, Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellmann. Came out last year and won the Goldsmiths Prize, so should be easy to get hold of. It's a long stream of consciousness novel about a woman somewhere in America baking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducks,_Newburyport https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/can-one-sentence-capture-all-of-life
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Feb 27, 2020 15:31
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Safety Biscuits posted:How about something from the list of books that left copyright this year? That's actually why We was on the list :p
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Feb 27, 2020 15:49
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You know my rec, baby Fucker should be read
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Feb 27, 2020 16:43
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It looks like it's been over a year since we did a play, maybe we do one of those? Other people might have better suggestions but I've read a few by Sarah Ruhl and Annie Baker that I enjoyed thoroughly (most recently The Older Boy and Circle Mirror Transformation respectively)Safety Biscuits posted:Otherwise, Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellmann. Came out last year and won the Goldsmiths Prize, so should be easy to get hold of. It's a long stream of consciousness novel about a woman somewhere in America baking. I honestly thought a thousand page stream of consciousness novel wouldn't be overly popular but there's like a 3 month backlog on the holds for both the physical and ebook at my library lol
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Feb 27, 2020 16:47
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I'd like to give Benvenuto Cellini another shot at some point, but this may be too soon.
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Feb 27, 2020 16:52
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alternate candidates: https://twitter.com/lordbeef/status/1233205767517270016 https://twitter.com/BoltGSR/status/1232792900431253504?s=20
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Feb 28, 2020 13:07
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voting for the time-traveling 9/11 dog
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Feb 28, 2020 18:37
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bridge of birds
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Feb 29, 2020 03:36
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Been having a real turd of a month but finally managed to set a day aside right at the end and read this again. I'm very thankful that it got selected, even if the thread didn't end up having all that much discussion.
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Mar 1, 2020 05:01
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i have the tendency to go months without reading books, then read a dozen of them in a few weeks. regardless of the discussion, i view the book of the month as more of a curated list of books that aren't even on my radar (like this one) and for that i am grateful PS confederacy of dunces would make a fantastic november 2020 selection
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Mar 2, 2020 17:26
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:
That's part of the goal, yeah.
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Mar 3, 2020 01:44
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