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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 June: Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood (Hiatus) August: Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Between the World and Me September: Wilkie Collins -- The Moonstone [url=http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3745212]October:Seth Dickinson -- The Traitor Baru Cormorant Current: Svetlana Alexievich -- Voices from Chernobyl quote:Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster is a book by Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich.[1] Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in 1986 at the time of the Chernobyl disaster. (At the time Belarus was part of the Soviet Union as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.) About the Author quote:Born in the west Ukrainian town of Stanislaviv (since 1962 Ivano-Frankivsk) to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother, Alexievich grew up in Belarus. After finishing school she worked as a reporter in several local newspapers before graduating from Belarusian State University (1972) and becoming a correspondent for the literary magazine Neman in Minsk (1976).[7] Discussion, Questions & Themes: quote:
Pacing No spoiler rules, I think we all know what happened. Just dive in. References and Further Reading 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!
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Nov 4, 2015 04:45
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I made inquiries with the publisher about this and it seems to be out of print. Or is only the British version out of print?
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Nov 4, 2015 16:29
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:I made inquiries with the publisher about this and it seems to be out of print. Or is only the British version out of print? Only Britain. If you don't mind ordering from American Amazon its available.
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Nov 4, 2015 16:30
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So to get this crazy train a-rolling, I wanted to ask about this. I keep finding myself wondering about the concept of heroism. Can we call the liquidators of Chernobyl, especially when shown their own voices, heroic? They sacrificed their lives, health, families, reputations, and everything else to fight back against the single greatest human disaster in history. Their sacrifices fought back against what was just short of Armageddon for Europe. And yet, most of it was unknowing. They were greedy. They were drunkards. They were loyalists who bought too hard into propaganda. Almost none of the people who gave of themselves to fight against Chernobyl did so with knowledge of what they would end up having to sacrifice. They barely had an understanding of what was happening, of what radiation was and could do. I find myself wondering about their legacy. What do we make of men and women who quite literally saved the world, but did it from a position of absolute ignorance rather than any sort of benevolence? They did not intend to sacrifice everything, but they did you know?
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Nov 4, 2015 20:23
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In my village there were a couple of guys who had to go to Chernobyl for the cleanup works. I think they are generally seen - by themselves, too - as victims of the system more than anything else. I wouldn't really call them heroes either -- in my opinion, being heroic implies a choice and a conscious decision. Would you call heroic a man who has been pushed down on the road and with his body slows down a passing car enough to evade a crash? I won't be reading the book as for now I've had enough with 'Second-Hand Time', but I do have a question to those who have read this one: do you get a feeling that the author is interfering with the peoples' stories, 'pushing' them towards what she wants to hear and her view of the events? Can it be avoided in these kind of interviews in which the interviewer partly befriends people (at least that's te impression I got)? And does cutting out most of her own remarks and questions (assuming this is what she does here as well) to make the stories more impactful come with a cost of the book being less trustworthy? I did feel at times like watching a partisan documentary, with a lot of things edited out. How did you feel about this? Also, are the people she interviews here still predominately middle aged Belarussian literature teachers?
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Nov 10, 2015 20:50
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Burning Rain posted:In my village there were a couple of guys who had to go to Chernobyl for the cleanup works. I think they are generally seen - by themselves, too - as victims of the system more than anything else. I wouldn't really call them heroes either -- in my opinion, being heroic implies a choice and a conscious decision. Would you call heroic a man who has been pushed down on the road and with his body slows down a passing car enough to evade a crash? I feel like you are dropping some very culturally specific criticisms that we are not sure how to respond to. As for who she interviews, the vast majority are liquidators and families of liquidators.
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Nov 10, 2015 21:55
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Yea, that's why I didn't write anything for a few days hoping the conversation will liven up, but now I just wanted to get some action going even if I sound harsher than I actually feel. Although most of my questions were about the form of the book, I think. Alexievich is def worth reading and there's a lot talk about, TBB! Burning Rain fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Nov 10, 2015 |
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Nov 10, 2015 22:24
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For lack of anything else to discuss, could you give some more Russian-centric criticism of Alexievitch? I would be interested in seeing what people who have some experience with her pre-Nobel thought of her work.
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Nov 11, 2015 00:55
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What's a literal translation of the original title? I'm reading the Swedish translation which has the title "Bön för Tjernobyl" (lit Prayer for Chernobyl), and that gives off a different tone compared to the English title. So what was it like in the original language?
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Nov 11, 2015 06:11
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Zaito posted:What's a literal translation of the original title? I'm reading the Swedish translation which has the title "Bön för Tjernobyl" (lit Prayer for Chernobyl), and that gives off a different tone compared to the English title. So what was it like in the original language? Literal translation of the Russian title is 'Chernobyl Prayer' (so, the prayer of Chernobyl). Mel Mudkiper posted:For lack of anything else to discuss, could you give some more Russian-centric criticism of Alexievitch? I would be interested in seeing what people who have some experience with her pre-Nobel thought of her work. I would have to look deeper into it as I'm not Russian myself (I'm from Latvia, and there we had two of her books published before the Nobel, but they mostly flew under the radar). I know that her first book ("The Un-womanly face of the war") was a huge hit across USSR despite censors deleting parts and Alexievich herself being sued for 'defamation' of the heroic widows of Soviet soldiers. In the last couple of decades she's probably been more popular in Western Europe - especially among the prize committees - than at home, where she's not been given much shelf space or media presence. Also, after the collapse of Soviet Union there's been an explosion of witness literature and collections of peoples' memories, so her work is less unique now (although she has been very influential and still is important). Again, the situation in Russia and Belarus might be different. At least from this side of the border it seems they want to keep a part of the postcard image of Soviet Union (as well as propaganda tools) going, so the work of Alexievich and other people digging up crimes of the soviet regime is pushed to the margins. Because of this, the reviews of their work tend to be heavily politicised, not really focusing on the literary or journalistic merits.
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Nov 11, 2015 09:01
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need suggestions for next month.
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Nov 19, 2015 14:53
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How about the Letters of Van Gogh? Lots of different editions and translations, widely available and cheap copies in circulation. Edit: Even better than that, you can read all of the letters online legally. http://vangoghletters.org/vg/ There are facsimiles of letters, translations, drawings illustrated and footnotes, so anyone can dip in and out and even search for images, names and dates. Josef K. Sourdust fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Nov 27, 2015 |
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Nov 27, 2015 19:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:need suggestions for next month. What happened to dong a Star Wars book?
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Nov 30, 2015 22:35
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SirPhoebos posted:What happened to dong a Star Wars book? good taste intervened
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Nov 30, 2015 22:59
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SirPhoebos posted:What happened to dong a Star Wars book? It was voted down in last month's poll thread. That said, I didn't have time to do a poll this month, so for December it will be Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road. Thread will go up later today or tomorrow.
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Dec 1, 2015 14:45
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this book still has a waiting list as long as the Equator. Sorry I couldn't participate even when voting for it.
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Dec 1, 2015 19:32
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ulvir posted:this book still has a waiting list as long as the Equator. Sorry I couldn't participate even when voting for it. Will never forgive you
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Dec 1, 2015 20:02
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Sorry to kill another thread but I wanted to let you guys know that you aren't the only ones interested in discussing this book and that I kept your discussion questions in mind when I was reading. Also I promised myself that if a book I vote for gets chosen then I would actually read it.  Mel Mudkiper posted:I keep finding myself wondering about the concept of heroism. Can we call the liquidators of Chernobyl, especially when shown their own voices, heroic? They sacrificed their lives, health, families, reputations, and everything else to fight back against the single greatest human disaster in history. Their sacrifices fought back against what was just short of Armageddon for Europe. And yet, most of it was unknowing. They were greedy. They were drunkards. They were loyalists who bought too hard into propaganda. Almost none of the people who gave of themselves to fight against Chernobyl did so with knowledge of what they would end up having to sacrifice. They barely had an understanding of what was happening, of what radiation was and could do. Burning Rain posted:In my village there were a couple of guys who had to go to Chernobyl for the cleanup works. I think they are generally seen - by themselves, too - as victims of the system more than anything else. I wouldn't really call them heroes either -- in my opinion, being heroic implies a choice and a conscious decision. At first I was inclined to think that all of these people were heroes. It was hard not to think that after reading about the firefighter in the prologue -- and his wife, who got ill taking care of him even though she was told to stop going near him. But I see what you mean, especially after some of the monologues flat out said that they wouldn't have done what they did if they knew the risks. More than one woman said that if she knew what would happen then she'd have bolted the door and blocked her husband from going out. Then there was an environmental inspector who said it's easy to ignore risks and justify anything to oneself, as when she ignored certain problems because they're outside of her job description. I guess it comes down to how you'd really define "heroic." If it has to be a completely informed and conscious decision then I think it's extremely rare because I doubt most people are fully aware of the risks of everything they do. I think "victims of the system" is a good descriptor, though. I'm not finished but thanks for suggesting this book, too much of what I knew about Chernobyl was from demotivational posters and I have learned a lot in the last week.
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Dec 8, 2015 21:01
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