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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 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 [url=http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3723739&pagenumber=1&perpage=40#post446887688]June: Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood (Hiatus) August: Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Between the World and Me Current: Wilkie Collins -- The Moonstone Free on Kindle:http://www.amazon.com/The-Moonstone-Wilkie-Collins-ebook/dp/B0084AYI92 (also free on Project Gutenberg) quote:T. S. Eliot described The Moonstone as "the first and greatest of English detective novels". It is certainly a landmark in the history of crime fiction and has a strong claim to having established detective fiction as a genre. It influenced Collins's successors from Trollope and Conan Doyle onwards and has set the standard by which other detective novels are judged. During its serialisation in All the Year Round there were crowds of anxious readers outside the publishers' offices in Wellington Street waiting for the next instalment. Like The Woman in White, it has never been out of print. http://www.wilkie-collins.info/wilkie_collins_biography.htm I think people will like this one. It's probably the first "modern" detective novel, and it really is surprisingly modern in a lot of ways, not just in terms of tone but also in terms of technical tricks like multiple narrators, from different backgrounds, all writing from their individual and distinct point of view. There's also a lot of social commentary implicit in the text, some of it surprisingly modern in its viewpoint. (On the other hand, some of it doesn't come off so well from a modern viewpoint, either). More importantly though it's just a hell of a story. Parts may seem a little hackneyed but remember he's inventing the tropes. corn in the bible posted:I was in Italy once, in this little backwater town out in the middle of nowhere, and the bookstore had exactly one book in English, which was Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. About the Author quote:He lived an unconventional, Bohemian lifestyle, loved good food and wine to excess, wore flamboyant clothes, travelled abroad frequently, formed long-term relationships with two women but married neither, and took vast quantities of opium over many years to relieve the symptoms of ill health. Collins's circle of friends included many pre-eminent figures of the day. He knew the major writers, particularly Charles Dickens with whom he regularly collaborated, as well as a host of minor novelists. His friends and acquaintances included some of the foremost artists, playwrights, theatrical personalities, musicians, publishers, physicians and society figures of the time. Collins's unorthodox lifestyle reveals a cynical regard for the Victorian establishment. This view is reflected in his books together with a sense of humour and a profound understanding for many of the then prevailing social injustices. http://www.wilkie-collins.info/wilkie_collins_biography.htm Discussion, Questions & Themes: quote:After The Moonstone, Collins's novels contained fewer thriller elements and more social commentary. The subject matter continued to be sensational, but his popularity declined. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne commented: "What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? / Some demon whispered—'Wilkie! have a mission."[22] Pacing Let's try to keep spoilers out of the thread until September 15th at least. References and Further Reading Wilkie is the narrator of Dan Simmon's novel Drood. 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 22:43 on Sep 5, 2015 |
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Sep 4, 2015 03:50
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I must admit that I was really into the first part of the novel while I was travelling. Then I had a break and when I got back to book I started the second section and I never adjusted properly. So, confession: I never finished it. Did anyone else find that transition difficult?
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Sep 4, 2015 08:18
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:I must admit that I was really into the first part of the novel while I was travelling. Then I had a break and when I got back to book I started the second section and I never adjusted properly. So, confession: I never finished it. Did anyone else find that transition difficult? I think he does such a good job with the first narrator that the shift to the second one takes a little to get used to. It's worth making the attempt to dive back in though. Anyway, found this: quote:One of the features that made The Moonstone such a success was the sensationalist depiction of opium addiction. Unbeknownst to his readership, Collins was writing from personal experience. In his later years, Collins grew severely addicted to laudanum and as a result suffered from paranoid delusions, the most notable being his conviction that he was constantly accompanied by a doppelganger he dubbed "Ghost Wilkie".
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Sep 4, 2015 22:49
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think he does such a good job with the first narrator that the shift to the second one takes a little to get used to. It's worth making the attempt to dive back in though. Thanks for raising Moonstone. It reminds me that I should really go back and finish it. I guess the break in my reading happened at just the wrong place. Conan Doyle set some Sherlock stories around opium dens a little later than Collins. But I guess the Romantics dabbled in laudanum (esp. Quincy and Coleridge) and Poe benefited from flirting with opium also - and they came before Collins. I guess there are plenty books on that aspect of literature.
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Sep 4, 2015 23:08
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I read this a couple of years ago and it completely caught me off-guard: when you think early detective novel, you don't exactly imagine you'd be surprised by whodunit. Looking forward to rereading it now.
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Sep 5, 2015 12:08
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quote:Collins quickly fell into Dickens’s orbit. . . . . It is tempting to see the strangely bonded doppelgängers who populate Collins’s fiction as reflecting something of his own relationship with Dickens. Collins became Dickens’s most trusted friend, a frequent house guest and travelling companion. Dickens found Collins’s aura of louche bohemianism liberating. His letters to Collins often contain sly sexual innuendo, and the pair went on midnight tours of the disreputable corners of London and Paris. In 1857, while acting in a play by Collins, Dickens fell in love with the young actress Ellen Ternan, who became his lover. Soon, he was proposing that he and Collins collaborate on “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices” (recently reprinted by Hesperus; $13.95)—a humorous account of a walking tour through Cumberland, whose itinerary provided cover for Dickens as he trailed Ternan. quote:Still, in his own fashion, Collins did manage to get to the top of the mountain. The fact that his work could be imitated says something about its fidelity to a strain of human experience, and about his method of describing that experience, which is plainspoken and radically inclusive. In the same way that everyone in Collins’s stories becomes his own detective—spying, dressing up, intercepting mail—so everyone also becomes his own explainer. Nannies, servants, gentlemen, ladies, the wronged, the robbed, and the guilty all contribute to Collins’s narrative. This makes the books feel, for all the old contrivances of plot, a mirror of contemporary reality. Collins anticipated an age in which everyone is a writer. (Source article contains Moonstone spoilers so I'll post the link later). Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Sep 5, 2015 |
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Sep 5, 2015 19:57
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So should I avoid this thread until I have finished the book because of spoilers?
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Sep 5, 2015 22:24
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Let's try to keep spoilers out of the thread until September 15th at least.
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Sep 5, 2015 22:43
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Thanks. I didn't whether or not to come back the thread to read the answer to "Should I avoid the thread?".  I guess that must be some kind of logic problem in Philosophy 101.
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Sep 6, 2015 08:25
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I really enjoyed the women in white when I read it a few years ago, hope this is even better. E: started reading, this book makes me want to read ROBINSON CRUSOE.
Lumius fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Sep 7, 2015 |
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Sep 7, 2015 05:41
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Nobody has anything else to say? =( Also, we need suggestions for next month.
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Sep 15, 2015 21:13
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I'll be starting this one soon! For a book for next month: the man booker prize shortlist came out recently, perhaps one of them? Elena Ferranta her series has also been getting some buzz lately?
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Sep 15, 2015 21:33
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Walh Hara posted:I'll be starting this one soon! A Brief History of Seven Killings would be an adventure, but I doubt this subforum has the stamina for it. If last month taught us anything, its that a book that fosters discussion is the key to a successful book club thread.
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Sep 15, 2015 22:40
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Mel Mudkiper posted:A Brief History of Seven Killings would be an adventure, but I doubt this subforum has the stamina for it. Yeah can't be bothered with Moonstone, but of the shortlist Seven Killings is the only one I bought because it sounds the most interesting. (plus it was 7 bucks) EDIT: So I guess my submissions are that, or Submission (quite timely vis a vis Europe). thehomemaster fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Sep 16, 2015 |
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Sep 16, 2015 10:06
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I read the Moonstone some years ago and it was awesome. Takes a bit to get used to the writing but it's got a great twist. It's the next evolution of detective novel, once everyone figured out that you just make the least likely character the culprit. I recommend anyone on the fence give it a shot.
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Sep 17, 2015 06:27
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Mel Mudkiper posted:
That and a book that people want to read. Can y'all talk up your suggestions a bit?
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Sep 17, 2015 08:06
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quote:Michel Houellebecq's Submission: Author says novel imagining Muslim-run France is not Islamophobic scare story Rustle some jimmies imo.
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Sep 17, 2015 10:40
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:That and a book that people want to read. Can y'all talk up your suggestions a bit? I think the problem with a mystery is that nobody wants to come into the thread unless they're done because they want to avoid the possibility of spoilers
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Sep 18, 2015 15:20
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Yeah it's fair enough that people want to avoid spoilers, and I will admit that I found the initial part of the book easier to handle than the second part. But it's still a great read, and it's easy to see the DNA that was later used for most mystery novels. Difference is that Collins was looser and the novel more sprawling, but that's what gives it character. Take some of that stuff out and you essentially have an Agatha Christie book.
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Sep 19, 2015 22:15
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I had to wait until I'd finished my library books and then dig out the box with all the mystery novels! My edition is the 1946 Literary Guild edition, with lovely illustrations by William Sharp, so it was a nice read. Actually, a re-read, because I've had this book, in one version or another, for several decades. I like the different perspectives to the case and the use of diaries and reports, which technique was, of course, used by the likes of Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft. Having different voices present the evidence works well for me. I admit that the first time I read this, I suspected the perpetrator based entirely on the initial description of him. Not because I'm super-smart and detective-y, but as a teenager living in foster care, that type of person was inevitably a nasty creep. Therefore, he's guilty. Which is not a reasoned judgement even if I was right. The Miss Clack narrative was perhaps the most "difficult" for me, because I despise that sort of person soooo much. A bit of good ol' English "but he looks weird, you guys!". Also, the general "can't let the Indians have it because now that we stole it it's ours forever and the rightful owners aren't allowed to steal it right back from us" attitude, even, supposedly, from the Bombay Police. Their religion is weird, so they can't have their property back. Jennings and Murthwaite were the only ones with any real sense. Cuff was pretty good, but let his one bias interfere, so he loses points there. Also, I hate writing book reports. :p
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Sep 20, 2015 21:35
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Just finished this. Great book. I didn't like Jennings part at all, simply because I felt that part to be too predictable and unnecessary. There was not much progression in the story during the part he wrote, the only thing that happens is that something is proven which was obviously true (for us, the readers) in the first place. Otherwise the story was really appealing to me and the mystery was well done, although lacking a bit in the number of suspects. The thing I liked the most is that Cuff was wrong.
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Sep 23, 2015 21:13
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Any last minute suggestions for the poll for next month before I scrounge together something from the recent posts in the Recommendations thread?
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Sep 26, 2015 03:18
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Any last minute suggestions for the poll for next month before I scrounge together something from the recent posts in the Recommendations thread? Something by Robertson Davies.
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Sep 26, 2015 03:34
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xcheopis posted:Something by Robertson Davies. Ok, but he's been suggested before and included in polls and nobody bit. Which book and why should people read it?
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Sep 26, 2015 04:04
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Man, I wish I'd seen this thread 25 days ago. Like Josef K. Sourdust I loved the first part but couldn't get on-board with the second. I chalk it up to Collins' skill actually. I really enjoyed the voice of the first narrator (and, ya, it made me want to read Robinson Caruso) but found the second insufferable. So points for distinctive, realistic voices. Unfortunately, I started reading this because I read ]Drood -- a profoundly kick rear end novel in its own right but it totally gives away the twist in Moonstone. Between the less enjoyable narrator and having zero suspense I just couldn't chug on. It's still on my "to read" list, though.
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Sep 26, 2015 05:29
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Ok, but he's been suggested before and included in polls and nobody bit. Which book and why should people read it? High Spirits. It's short, it's funny, and it's good for a discussion on the merits of the ghost story. (I love ghost stories.)
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Sep 26, 2015 06:20
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xcheopis posted:A bit of good ol' English "but he looks weird, you guys!". Oh, and this is my comment: The real question I have about the book is the extent to which Collins was deliberately painting the Indian characters as heroes. To a modern reader they come across that way; they certainly seem to win in the end; but I'm not sure what message Wilkie was trying to send. Was he defending "natives" ? Implicitly critiquing colonialism? Just writing a good story that played on the doubts as to the validity of their colonial enterprise that even the most British Britisher must have, on some level, had? I don't know!
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Sep 26, 2015 08:35
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Any last minute suggestions for the poll for next month before I scrounge together something from the recent posts in the Recommendations thread? Babyfucker by Urs Allemann
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Sep 26, 2015 10:19
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Oh, and this is my comment: How common was the protest against colonialism for that time and amongst that social class?
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Sep 26, 2015 15:02
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Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Somebody said the best books for BoTM are ones that generate discussion and this one might do it? Plus I'm planning to read it soon anyway and I think many people still need to complete the "read a Philosophy book" challenge from the challenge thread. Otherwise I'd prefer a book by a female author because my reading list has been way too male centric lately. As mentioned before, maybe the first book from the Neapolitano series? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neapolitan_Novels_%28series%29 edit: flowers for algernon is really good. Walh Hara fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Sep 27, 2015 |
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Sep 26, 2015 15:05
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It's banned books week next week and Amazon has a bunch of them on sale, so maybe one of those - Flowers for Algernon perhaps? http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=s9_al_ft_brwse?_encoding=UTF8&node=7533915011&tag=dreldarion-20
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Sep 26, 2015 19:54
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alternate plan: maybe we just make The Traitor Baru Cormorant next months' book since it's a Book Barn author and it's getting good reviews and so forth? edit: hrm nah I need to do the poll don't I Ok poll will go up later tonight
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Sep 28, 2015 22:35
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Oh, and this is my comment: To me it read that Collins was a little more sympathetic to their plight and was actually critiquing colonialism. But at the same time there's this thinly veiled stereotypical portrayal of the Indians that slightly undercuts that somewhat. Though it could be argued that he was just using the language and ideas of the time to do it. I remember thinking the opening in particular had a sort of 'Boys Own Adventure' feel to it that ends up being out of place with the rest of the book.
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Sep 29, 2015 13:31
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