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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > January BOTM POLLLLLL
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This poll is closed.
The Emperor of All Maladies 5 18.52%
The New Jim Crow 4 14.81%
Her Body and Other Parties 7 25.93%
Roadside Picnic 8 29.63%
A Newly out-of-copyright work 3 11.11%
Total: 15 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
1) The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

quote:

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and now a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

2) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

quote:

In the eight years since its publication, “The New Jim Crow,” a book by Michelle Alexander that explores the phenomenon of mass incarceration, has sold well over a million copies, been compared to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, been cited in the legal decisions to end stop-and-frisk and sentencing laws, and been quoted passionately on stage at the Academy Awards.

But for the more than 130,000 adults in prison in North Carolina and Florida, the book is strictly off-limits.

And prisoners around the country often have trouble obtaining copies of the book, which points to the vast racial disparities in sentencing policy, and the way that mass incarceration has ravaged the African-American population.

This month, after protests, New Jersey revoked a ban some of its prisons had placed on the book, while New York quickly scrapped a program that would have limited its inmates’ ability to receive books at all.


3) Her Body and Other Parties

quote:

The eight fables in Machado’s book all depict women on the verge. A wife struggles to keep her husband from untying the mysterious ribbon she wears around her neck. The victim of a violent assault discovers she can hear the thoughts of the actors in porn films. Two women make a baby together — or do they? The book’s novella-length centerpiece, “Especially Heinous,” rewrites almost 300 episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” arguably the dominant fairy tale of our time, with its ritualistic opening riff, the women in distress, the tidy resolutions.

Machado is fluent in the vocabulary of fairy tales — her stories are full of foxes, foundlings, nooses and gowns — but she remixes it to her own ends. Her fiction is both matter-of-factly and gorgeously queer. She writes about loving and living with women and men with such heat and specificity that it feels revelatory.

4) Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

quote:

Roadside Picnic is a work of fiction based on the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation that simultaneously took place in half a dozen separate locations around Earth over a two-day period. Neither the Visitors themselves nor their means of arrival or departure were ever seen by the local populations who lived inside the relatively small areas, each a few square kilometers, of the six Visitation Zones. The zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena not understood by humans, and contain artifacts with inexplicable, seemingly supernatural properties.[citation needed] The title of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic:

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

5) A newly out-of-copyright book from this list (or nominate your own in a comment!

  • Cane by Jean Toomer
  • The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
  • Bambi by Felix Salten, illustrated by Barbara Cooney—the source of Disney’s animated film, and the first in a series
  • The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud
  • Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier
  • Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers
  • Short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” by Virginia Woolf
  • Emily of New Moon, the first book of L.M. Montgomery’s Emily trilogy
  • The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse
  • Two of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Murder on the Links
  • The Prisoner, volume 5 of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (note that English translations have their own copyrights)
  • The Complete Works of Anthony Trollope
  • George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan
  • Short stories by Christie, Virginia Woolf, H.P. Lovecraft, Katherine Mansfield, and Ernest Hemingway
  • Poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Sukumar Ray, and Pablo Neruda
  • Works by Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jean Cocteau, Italo Svevo, Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, Maria Montessori, Lu Xun, Joseph Conrad, Zane Grey, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs
* # ¿ Jan 2, 2019 00:10
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# ¿ Jan 22, 2025 21:40
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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
Ok, it'll be Roadside Picnic. I'll get a thread up tomorrow.

Next month will be some out of copyright choices.

* # ¿ Jan 5, 2019 07:28
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > January BOTM POLLLLLL