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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 Current: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado  Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N9EB4LP/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 About the book: silvergoose posted:
derp posted:Her Body and Other Parties is the only book i read this year that came out this year. it was rly fkn good tho derp posted:her body and other parties was Really loving Good Catfishenfuego posted:Just finished Her Body and Other Parties which was very good and as a lesbian encountering deep existential dread that may or may not involve the supernatural or may just be my own mounting madness was very relatable to me. quote:"What's worse, writing a trope or being one?" the narrator of Carmen Maria Machado's story "The Resident," asks. She is at an artists' colony, and one of the other residents — a "poet-composer" named Lydia — has snidely announced that the narrator's autobiographical writing plays into the madwoman in the attic stereotype, not to mention the crazy lesbian stereotype. "It's sort of tiresome and regressive and, well, done," says Lydia. https://www.npr.org/2017/10/08/553978325/-her-body-and-other-parties-be-your-own-madwoman quote:She has been decapitated twice, had her right arm sawed off once and been smeared with paint too many times to count. No public monument has faced such steady abuse as the statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid perched on a large rock in a Copenhagen harbor. Among her most faithful assailants have been feminist groups protesting her as “a symbol of hostility to women.” In 2006, they attached a dildo to her hand, in honor of International Women’s Day. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/books/review-her-body-and-other-parties-carmen-maria-machado.html About the Author(s) quote:Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Her story collection Her Body and Other Parties was published in 2017. A finalist for the National Book Award[1] and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, her stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica. Machado lives in Philadelphia with her wife.[2] https://twitter.com/carmenmmachado Themes Sexy Body Horror? Existential Lesbian Dread? I don't know, I haven't read this yet! 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 If you have any please suggest them in the thread below! 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! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Oct 1, 2019 |
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Oct 1, 2019 23:24
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if you don't want to read this book (which is weird, it's a lot of fun, you should) and/or are on the fence about it, both the husband stitch and inventory have been published publicly and are (in my opinion) two of the strongest stories in the collection (law and order fan fiction novella excluded): https://granta.com/the-husband-stitch/ http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/inventory/
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Oct 2, 2019 02:11
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I've gotten through the first three stories already and I'm really digging the way she writes. Apologies in advanced for the fact my stuff is so shallow; I haven't really written critically about anything I've read in... a long time, so it feels pretty stiff and awkward to do. The Husband Stitch with the ribbons was very good, though I saw what was going to happen a mile away when she took the ribbon off. That running thread of 'here's all the rest of me but this is mine'--and then removing that ultimately ending the self, too, felt a bit apt to the thoughtless taking on display. And all the little stories and asides about the ways women exist, and are punished, and the tragedy of that existence, and the ways they survive--honestly, this has been my favourite of what I've read so far. I very much liked Inventory and the way it tracked the encroaching disease. The way it emphasized the humanity of trying to forge connections--however brief--while disaster's rolling over everything. Mothers captured some of the day dream quality of imagining a whole beautiful future with someone you love, but it also left me the most confused of the three I've read so far. I feel like I need to reread it to have a hope of understanding it; the jumping back and forth between imagining and present and then trying to understand what was even happening in the present was probably too much to take in in one go for me.
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Oct 7, 2019 03:03
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if you enjoyed "real women have bodies" (or liked the premise but thought the execution needed work) i think you would also enjoy yuten sawanishi's "filling up with sugar:" https://granta.com/filling-up-with-sugar/
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Oct 13, 2019 20:01
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Tree Goat posted:if you don't want to read this book (which is weird, it's a lot of fun, you should) and/or are on the fence about it, both the husband stitch and inventory have been published publicly and are (in my opinion) two of the strongest stories in the collection (law and order fan fiction novella excluded): are they all this horny
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Oct 17, 2019 03:59
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chernobyl kinsman posted:are they all this horny So far, yes.
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Oct 17, 2019 04:05
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that's gonna be a pass then
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Oct 17, 2019 04:54
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chernobyl kinsman posted:are they all this horny those are the second and third horniest imo
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Oct 17, 2019 05:42
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these are redolent of nerd sexuality, the kind of writing about (and hyperfixation on) sex that only comes from people who have not actually had much sex
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Oct 17, 2019 15:38
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chernobyl kinsman posted:these are redolent of nerd sexuality, the kind of writing about (and hyperfixation on) sex that only comes from people who have not actually had much sex the eros of the fanfic, you are saying
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Oct 18, 2019 16:22
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Man, it's been a year, but while I remember sexuality playing a role, I'm not sure that I recall the book being particularly horny.
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Oct 18, 2019 16:41
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Horny is great, let's be horny that said sorry I haven't had much time to participate in the book this month. Need suggestions for next month. Right now i'm thinking either Maltese Falcon or something by Olga Tokarczuk.
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Oct 22, 2019 01:22
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Horny is great, let's be horny i'm making my way through flights and it's very good so far
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Oct 22, 2019 02:28
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I finished this one, and I liked it for the most part. The Law and Order story was probably my favourite of the whole bunch in that in actually managed to get a real sense of dread about what was happening. Several of them the endings kind of felt flat; Machado is really good at building up a particular emotion, but so many of the endings were unsatisfying. The gothic one with the writer's retreat comes to mind, and the story with the ribbons. I'm looking forward to seeing what else she writes, all the same.
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Oct 22, 2019 04:03
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FelicityGS posted:I finished this one, and I liked it for the most part. The Law and Order story was probably my favourite of the whole bunch in that in actually managed to get a real sense of dread about what was happening. Several of them the endings kind of felt flat; Machado is really good at building up a particular emotion, but so many of the endings were unsatisfying. The gothic one with the writer's retreat comes to mind, and the story with the ribbons. I'm looking forward to seeing what else she writes, all the same. Pretty much agreed, although I thought the Husband Stitch is one of the few that ended really well, and the ending struck me enough that it's one of the stories I immediately reread and that stuck with me. I also really enjoyed the Law and Order story as well, it was a little gimmicky at first but once it got going it was both funny and yeah had a real sense of dread.
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Oct 24, 2019 20:57
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I think it was just that the ending to the Husband Stitch was just so telegraphed that it kind of sucked out the fun of it for me. She had built up this really interesting concept and I just wanted it to do something else; I get that's mostly on me. And yeah, I love her humor when it shines through--most the stories had at least one or two spots where they made me laugh.
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Oct 24, 2019 23:48
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Horny is great, let's be horny Ambrose Bierce, Can Such Things Be? https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4366
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Oct 25, 2019 03:47
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FelicityGS posted:I think it was just that the ending to the Husband Stitch was just so telegraphed that it kind of sucked out the fun of it for me. She had built up this really interesting concept and I just wanted it to do something else; I get that's mostly on me. I get what you're saying, but I feel like the telegraphing is very deliberate, given that the central metaphor is for a relationship where your partner is constantly pushing on some boundary, and you know giving in will end terribly for you, but they can never be dissuaded for long and they just keep pushing and pushing, and finally you give in even knowing how badly this will end. It's a hard story for me to read, but it's very deliberate.
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Oct 25, 2019 23:39
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November we will do Maltese Falcon. I'll get a thread up as soon as I can.
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Nov 1, 2019 18:08
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https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1191705692656287750
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Nov 5, 2019 13:24
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