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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 the moderation team. Past Books of the Month [for BOTM before 2018, refer to archives] 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 October: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado November: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett December: Moby Dick by Herman Melville 2020: January: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair February: WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin March: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini April: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio May: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Dame Rebecca West  Current: The African Queen by C. S. Forester The book is freely available in the following location: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180238 About the book https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/african-queen-c-s-forester/1100996303 posted:First published in 1935, C.S. Forester's classic romantic adventure is a tale of opposites attracted. Allnut and Rose, a disreputable Cockney and an English spinster missionary, wend their way down a river in Central Africa in a rickety, asthmatic steam launch, and are gradually joined together in a mission of retaliation against the Germans. Fighting time, heat, malaria and bullets, the two have a dramatic rapprochement before the explosive ending of the book. This tale of unlikely love is thrilling and funny and ultimately satisfying. About the Author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Forester posted:Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (27 August 1899 – 2 April 1966), known by his pen name Cecil Scott "C. S." Forester, was an English novelist known for writing tales of naval warfare, such as the 12-book Horatio Hornblower series depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic wars. The Hornblower novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1938. http://authorscalendar.info/forester.htm posted:British historical novelist, biographer, and journalist, best-known as the creator of Horatio Hornblower, a swashbuckling hero and naval officer in Nelson's time, whose career is told in a series of a dozen books. Hornblower is one of the great mariner characters in literature along with Ulysses, Sinbad, Captain Ahab, and Lord Jim. Endorsements: https://csforester.wordpress.com/ posted:Kingsley Amis : Fiction like (this) is bound to deliver, so why waste time on new stuff? 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 There’s a rather famous film of the book from 1951, directed by John Huston and starring Katharine Hepburn (  ) and Humphrey Bogart (winning his only Oscar). It’s worth a watch.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 we hope everyone enjoys the book!
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Jun 2, 2020 16:40
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 07:39 |
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Allnut lol
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Jun 2, 2020 20:16
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I shoulda rated this higher on horniness. Second paragraph and we're in going commando territory. edit: I ah may have forgotten the almost immediate use of the n word in this book. 
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Jun 3, 2020 |
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Jun 3, 2020 02:29
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Discendo Vox posted:
oh no DV what have you done
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Jun 6, 2020 12:46
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Well, I got this from the library. I guess I'm in for the month!
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Jun 8, 2020 02:47
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And I'm about a hundred pages in. This is a pretty exciting book, once it gets going. And I've learned rapids cure saggy bosoms.
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Jun 9, 2020 04:49
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horniness clearly needs to be a calibrated factor for future selections.
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Jun 10, 2020 22:09
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Discendo Vox posted:horniness clearly needs to be a calibrated factor for future selections. Yup. Definitely some horny here.
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Jun 11, 2020 15:20
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Can someone provide a cockney to American translation for "coo" because I get most of what Allnut is saying but this is really driving me up a wall.
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Jun 11, 2020 18:19
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nut posted:Allnut lol
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Jun 11, 2020 18:57
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Humerus posted:Can someone provide a cockney to American translation for "coo" because I get most of what Allnut is saying but this is really driving me up a wall. The dictionary says, "used to express surprise." I think most can be easily replaced by something like "Whoa" or "Would you look at that?" or "wow" or whatever you prefer.
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Jun 11, 2020 19:45
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Ben Nevis posted:The dictionary says, "used to express surprise." I think most can be easily replaced by something like "Whoa" or "Would you look at that?" or "wow" or whatever you prefer. Yes, it's this. It's a rather pre-Great War thing to say, I think I've only seen in it Edith Nesbit before. E: Ben Nevis posted:Yup. Definitely some horny here. Why do you think he's called Allnut?
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Jun 12, 2020 08:52
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Ben Nevis posted:And I'm about a hundred pages in. This is a pretty exciting book, once it gets going. And I've learned rapids cure saggy bosoms. Yeah, I'm like . . 7 percent into this thing. Observations so far: 1) When you're English, other countries' colonialism is Not Great, and 2) At first I thought this was a WW2 book (maybe due to the movie?), but it's written 1935, set 1914. 3) I really like how Forester is not skimping on the nautical detail, like having to anchor the bow of the boat upstream, etc. Of course you'd expect that from the author of Hornblower but it's that kind of granular detail that makes a book feel real and come alive, and there's an art to weaving it into the narrative so that you aren't just reading a technical manual. 4) Rose is literally getting younger as the book progresses. She starts the book "approaching middle age," then Allnut shows up and suddenly she's thirty. At some point this month I'll watch the movie too. Here's Ebert talking about it: quote:Holding forth about actors a few years ago, John Huston allowed as how there were good ones and bad ones, and then there were a few like splendid thoroughbreds: All you had to do was judge their gait and you could see they had class. https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/african-queen-still-reigns Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Jun 12, 2020 |
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Jun 12, 2020 11:58
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:4) Rose is literally getting younger as the book progresses. She starts the book "approaching middle age," then Allnut shows up and suddenly she's thirty.
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Jun 12, 2020 15:27
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Those are the same thing. Mathematically sure but rhetorically the first makes you think she's past menopause. I mean, technically, a five year old is approaching middle age, but if you hear someone described that way you think they're in their forties, or at least I do.
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Jun 12, 2020 16:04
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If you're in your forties, you're already there (certainly if you're "past menopause"). If you're out of your twenties, you're getting there soon. This is really dumb.
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Jun 12, 2020 16:51
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I’m a chapter ahead of you and rose is a zygote
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Jun 12, 2020 17:04
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Unbirthing was certainly an unconventional choice for an ending, especially for the time period.
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Jun 13, 2020 03:23
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I think we just figured out that HA is a  Hieronymous Alloy posted:2) At first I thought this was a WW2 book (maybe due to the movie?), but it's written 1935, set 1914. The Germans are presumably the same people who'd go on to participate in the Herero genocide in the 20s, so they're hardly a million miles away. Anyway, time for me to start this, too. Edit: Now that I have started reading, it says on page two that she's 33, so she's got a rather big decision on her mind. Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Jun 14, 2020 |
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Jun 13, 2020 04:16
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I wrapped this thing up tonight. The ending was a little weird, in that they protagonists fail and the British Navy does everything and why were they even there? The movie handles the ending better in narrative terms. I was confused by this until I realized that Forester had been inspired by a real naval battle, as was the British public of the time, and the whole rest of this story was really just an excuse for writing that set-piece, not the other way around.
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Jun 17, 2020 05:43
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I wrapped this thing up tonight. Re the ending: I really wanted them to blow up Germans. I was disappointed when they didn't get to. It really felt anti-climactic to finally get past the germans, over the rapids, and through the fire swamp, to be quickly shuffled off with some minor British functionary because they were a bother. And then the British win, no thanks to our would-be heroes. The whole daring escapade doesn't even register. That's neat that the final battle was based on a real one. Generally, I'd say I enjoyed it. It was fun and I'm kind of a sucker for adventure stories.
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Jun 17, 2020 14:55
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Is there general interest in more of this historic sort of pulpy material?
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Jun 18, 2020 02:52
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Discendo Vox posted:Is there general interest in more of this historic sort of pulpy material? I'm game. I know I've nominated Sabatini before. I'm almost always up for stuff like that.
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Jun 19, 2020 20:30
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Ending chat: I also felt it was a little anticlimactic. I was at least holding out hope that the explosives on the African Queen would come into play somehow, like the German ship would hit it and cause an explosion and the British would be somewhat impressed with the two main characters. Ultra gritty ending would have been said explosion taking out the Brits too but that seemed even less likely. The biggest thing that bothered me was the instant they slept together Rose became a homemaker on their lovely boat and was dusting and everything. For it's time though it was probably better than most so that's... something I suppose.
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Jun 21, 2020 22:27
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quote:she was wearing no underclothes. Most of them had been consumed in the service of the boat—as hand shields when the propeller shaft was straightened and so on—and the rest was dedicated to Allnutt’s use. His own clothing had disintegrated, and now he moved chastely about the boat in Rose’s chemise and drawers It's a shame this bit didn't make it into the film... E: Just finished it. The ending was terrible and the film version was much better - in the film the African Queen sinks and then the Germans sail into her, setting off the explosives moments after Allnut and Rose persuade the captain to marry them. The Brits aren't involved at all. There's a book and a Wikipedia page about the battle that inspired the book; fun fact, the ship the Königin Luise was probably based on was refloated and apparently still sailing around Lake Tanganyika. Hieronymous Alloy posted:The ending was a little weird, in that they protagonists fail and the British Navy does everything and why were they even there? The movie handles the ending better in narrative terms. I was confused by this until I realized that Forester had been inspired by a real naval battle, as was the British public of the time, and the whole rest of this story was really just an excuse for writing that set-piece, not the other way around. It's not even a long or dramatic set-piece... Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 09:03
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Ben Nevis posted:I'm game. I know I've nominated Sabatini before. I'm almost always up for stuff like that. Yeah, that's why I keep nominating The Curse of Capistrano, it's the single best example of that kind of thing. It never wins the voting though. speaking of I need suggestions for next month. Right now I'm thinking maybe The End of Policing, maybe something along the lines of https://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/articles/1948_09_xx_partisan_review.pdf ,
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Jun 22, 2020 13:32
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That's topical! Last month's equal first places were The Club Dumas and The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, plus quantumfoam suggested A Prince of Swindlers: quantumfoam posted:Please add " by Guy Boothby" http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54771 as a voting option for the upcoming June 2020 Book of the Month Club.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:44
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whoah im gonna pick this up regardless but will wait if it wins to start it
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Jun 23, 2020 01:47
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Just putting up a reminder link for the Book Barn discord:
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Jun 25, 2020 12:20
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The poll for next month's BOTM ended up going up on Discord instead : https://discordapp.com/channels/563390516360773632/563392762183942166/725670461161078855 if you need a discord invite, https://discord.gg/cMHkCf
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Jun 29, 2020 15:33
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End of Policing won. I'll get a thread up soonish.
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Jul 1, 2020 13:46
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hornblower blows, is this in the same style?
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Jul 3, 2020 19:07
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ChubbyChecker posted:hornblower blows, is this in the same style? ~ish. More modern. https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1279120868745019392?s=20
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Jul 3, 2020 19:34
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:~ish. More modern. pity
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Jul 3, 2020 19:35
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main difference is that the characters in this book are much more sympathetic than Hornblower ever really manages to be
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Jul 3, 2020 19:48
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:main difference is that the characters in this book are much more sympathetic than Hornblower ever really manages to be oh, that sounds better
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Jul 3, 2020 19:58
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