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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 [for BOTM before 2014, refer to archives] 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 November:Svetlana Alexievich -- Voices from Chernobyl December: Michael Chabon -- Gentlemen of the Road 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 Current: The Vegetarian by Han Kang quote:
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/books/review/the-vegetarian-by-han-kang.html About the Author quote:Han Kang (Hangul: 한강; born November 27, 1970) is a South Korean writer.[1] She won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for The Vegetarian, a novel which deals with a woman’s decision to stop eating meat and its devastating consequences.[2] The novel is also the first of her books to be translated into English. Pacing Just read, then post. References and Further Reading I don't really know enough about this author to suggest, but I'm hoping other folks can chip in. 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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Jun 6, 2016 03:23
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Next month is going to be Lud in the Mist because it did well in the last poll, is respectably intelligent, is accessible, and is free -- I want to make sure we keep the BotM relatively accessible. I don't want to just do the same thing every month even if the "same thing" is "high-quality modern realistic lit fiction". That said I'll definitely add both of those to the next poll (which will be at the end of July). Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Jun 28, 2016 |
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Jun 28, 2016 16:35
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Rand Brittain posted:Arguably Lud-in-the-Mist is about elf wizards triumphing over the patriarchy. Sort of. Give it a chance folks, that's all I ask :P It's ok if y'all hate it. Please save comments on Lud for when I get the thread up though if we can, shouldn't be long. edit: ludthread is up. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Jul 1, 2016 |
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Jul 1, 2016 19:23
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A human heart posted:I don't think anyone should pay attention to what the author of a book called "Lord Foul's Bane" says about literature. Minor point because I think that book sucks but technically it's a deliberate satire of the genre and the corniness of that name is intentional.
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Jul 5, 2016 23:59
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Mel Mudkiper posted:To be blunt, do you know what they call Fantasy that has meaningful literary elements? Literature. Well, marketing isn't the definer of quality. There is *some* stuff marketed as SF that is still worth reading as "literature." Lord Dunsany springs to mind as the clear example. Personally I wouldn't include Malazan in that category but that's just my opinion. A year or so I put extra apostrophes in the Malazan thread title and nobody noticed for months.
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Jul 6, 2016 00:03
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Modern genre is about identifying the reader more than it is about defining the text itself. Right right -- not disagreeing at all, and I might steal your phrasing in future, that's very well put. One quote I keep coming back to in discussions of genre and what is/isn't "literature" is from Raymond Chandler, in The Simple Art of Murder, describing the work of Dashiell Hammett: quote:
http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html Any genre term will, as you say, pop if you squeeze it hard enough, but the corrollary to that is that almost any genre has something in it that's worth reading. There's something in the local Barnes and Noble fantasy section that you'd profit from reading, almost certainly. Mel Mudkiper posted:Is his article supposed to be a satire of a self-important dilettante trying to inflate his own ego in the face of crippling insecurity Didn't read it so can't say! Erickson (Malazan author) and Donaldson are like my two least favorite fantasy/sf writers. Donaldson is way too rapey for me and Erickson doesn't know when to stop putting apostrophes be'tween a'll the syll'abl'es. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Jul 6, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 06:17
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Oh yeah I don't really disagree with that. However, every time I've read a fantasy book that people swear is great I have been left underwhelmed. I've done Tolkein, Martin, Gaiman, etc and just been kind of blah. Hell, I've even given total garbage a shot like Piers Anthony and Terry Brooks. That's fair. Honestly I'm having a hard time thinking of fantasy you'd like. You seem like the literary equivalent of a pure black triple roast coffee drinker and fantasy is usually about the cream and sugar, as it were. You *might* like Gene Wolfe but he's really, really Catholic so you might not find him appealing either. Maybe some of Lord Dunsany's short stories (the thing I always recommend is "Idle Days in the Yann", which is free with a Google search). Hrm. I'd also suggest looking up "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny. That's it, that's my genre lit rec for you. (Technically it's SF but Zelazny blends sf &f). Also a short story and you can probably find it with Google, so minimal investment of time / energy.
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Jul 6, 2016 17:14
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knees of putty posted:It's really difficult for me to agree with this. Yes, there may be some small benefit, but it's so slight that you'd be better off daydreaming. More than that there's an opportunity cost - that time spent reading that crap could be much more profitably spent elsewhere. If you've looked at a B&N fantasy section lately, it's not all wheel of time and so forth. Usually they'll have a few older authors with some merit as well. I mean, Lovecraft for example is worth reading at least a little bit of no matter what your taste is, just because his work is such a part of the cultural zeitgeist.
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Jul 7, 2016 01:28
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Abalieno posted:I didn't like The Vegetarian because it was not fantasy. And I'm not immediately interested in something just because it is. Hoookay, I don't want to shut down legitimate discussion but this is starting to sound like you're more interested in talking about Malazan than you are this book, and we have a separate thread for Malazan already. It's probably best if you take further discussion of Malazan to the Malazan thread instead of this one (feel free to start up a Donaldson thread if you want). I mean, feel free to talk about what you want but let's try to make sure posts in this thread for this book are at least 50% or more about this book.
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Jul 11, 2016 23:35
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