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. ![]() ![]() Past Books of the Month [for BOTM before 2019, refer to archives] 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 June: The African Queen by C. S. Forester July: The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale August: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire, by Howard Pyle September: Strange Hotel, by Eimear McBride October:Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (怪談)("Ghost Stories"), by Lafcadio Hearn November: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) , by Matthew Hongoltz Hetling December: Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark 2021: January: The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley February: How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart March: Carrier Wave by Robert Brockway April: The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brian May: You Can't Win by Jack Black June:Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson July:Can Such Things Be by Ambrose Bierce August: Swann's Way by Marcel Proust Current: A Dreamer's Tales by Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany Book available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8129 html edition: https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/adta/index.htm About the book quote:When people ask me about “a book that changed my life,” one of the several hundred honest answers I can give them is A Dreamer’s Tales. (Then they look blank, which is too bad.) I was about twelve when I picked it up, one of those nice little leather-bound books the Modern Library used to do, and from the first sentence I was a goner. . . . -- Ursula K. LeGuin, http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/UKL-Review-Joshi-LordDunsany.html Hieronymous Alloy posted:Like 3/4ths of Dunsany's books are public domain and available online with an easy search. There are good editions of two of them here: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=dunsany quote:It interests me to hear of your first perusal of A Dreamer's Tales. Mine was in the fall of 1919, when I had never read anything of Dunsany's, though knowing of him by reputation. The book had been recommended to me by one whose judgment I did not highly esteem, & it was with some dubiousness that I began reading Poltarnees-Beholder of Ocean. The first paragraph arrested me as with an electric shock, & I had not read two pages before I became a Dunsany devotee for life. It was such a discovery as I shall never experience again, for I am too old for such emotional effects now. Thank Pegana I came across Dunsany when I did! (Howard Phillips Lovecraft) quote:Jorge Luis Borges, compiling a list of thirty-three “prologues” to his seminal story “The Library of Babel,” included Dunsany’s story “Idle Days on the Yann” alongside works by Kafka, Henry James, and Voltaire. . . “Idle Days on the Yann” often anticipates the imaginary travelogues of Italo Calvino. About the Author quote:Few things troubled the sunny complacency of Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany, but the prospect of being considered a dilettante and a small talent stood foremost among them. He had reason to hope that it would be otherwise. After knocking around for the first few years of the twentieth century, engaging in the typical pursuits of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy—hunting, soldiering, cricket, and an unsuccessful run for Parliament—he’d tried his hand at writing. He had to pay to put out his first book, in 1905, a sui-generis work of invented, quasi-Oriental mythology titled “The Gods of Pega¯na,” but he had no trouble finding publishers after that. W. B. Yeats, then the leader of the Irish Renaissance, described him as “a man of genius,” and produced his plays at the Abbey Theatre. Most of Dunsany’s plays were popular, and his verse was once such common currency that young Amory Blaine, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise,” takes to reciting it to the accompaniment of graphophone music during his “decadent” phase at Princeton. quote:Dunsany, however, the vain, antlike struggles of his characters notwithstanding, seemed to regard his own life as a most amusing game, made of equal parts theatrics and sharpshooting. He wrote with a quill pen in the tower of the castle that his family had occupied since 1190, and carried a gold-handled walking stick given to him by the Nabob of Rampur during a visit to India. He pursued big game in Africa, at a time when an ambitious expedition into the bush required having seventy-two African bearers and hiring a guide who, he wrote Beatrice, was sought “by the police of so many countries.” While staying with the Maharaja of Gwalior in the nineteen-twenties, he insisted on shooting a tiger face to face, instead of from the top of a stone tower thoughtfully provided for that purpose. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/12/06/minor-magus 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 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rewild-dunsany-estate-ireland https://deepcuts.blog/tag/lord-dunsany/ 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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# ? Feb 15, 2025 04:29 |
Light month this month since I think a lot of us are still working through Proust and this should be similar enough yet different enough. My favorite story in this collection is https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/adta/adta08.htm
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Aww, I was hoping more people would be reading this one. It's really great! Try it!
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I've been having some health issues and haven't been able to focus on reading lately. Really want to get to this one before the end of the month.
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I was reading Book of Wonder anyway, so I switched over to reading A Dreamer’s Tales. I can see why Lovecraft was a fan, because they share the same love of long-lost civilizations and ruin. They also have the same evocative descriptive style. But I can see why Lord Dunsany fell out of favor, because his stories don’t really follow a normal narrative structure. They’ll be something like “this is what always happens, and it happened again” or “this is something that happened, and I don’t know why.” Since the stories are only like 4 pages or something (I read on a Kindle so I have no real idea), he’s not telling another story within the framework; that’s all there is. So while they’re enjoyable as short mood pieces, the stories themselves don’t really stick with me when they’re over. My favorite story so far has been the talking cork etc. He does have a fondness for anthopomorphizing things.
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AngusPodgorny posted:
Yup, but that's precisely why I like him so much. So many modern fantasy writers, they're following a script to one degree or another; even someone trying to break the mold is usually just reacting to someone else's mold, GRRM going "grimdark and realistic" or whatever, and it all ends up being so predictable. But Dunsany is there at the start of things, opening like a flower, look at this beautiful flower, toss it aside; it was just a flower, but what wonder in that flower
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Really enjoying this, you can see how lots of authors used Dunsany as a jumping-off point. The Unhappy Body is also the first story I've read that can be summed up with a meme![]() Crashbee fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Sep 17, 2021 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:But Dunsany is there at the start of things, opening like a flower, look at this beautiful flower, toss it aside; it was just a flower, but what wonder in that flower
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anilEhilated posted:Less poetic than that, but I'd say they feel more like dreams than stories, they run on their own logic we cannot always understand. I've spent some time in hospital recently and this book was a great escape. Oh no! Hope you're feeling better or will soon, but glad the book helped!
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Idle Days on the Yann was more like a fantasy travelogue than a story, so inspired me to start reading the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which has been in my pile of things to read for a while but I was never quite in the mood for.
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I feel like this whole ocean problem could be resolved using a human chain and ropes instead of offering up hot women as a bribe.
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anilEhilated posted:Less poetic than that, but I'd say they feel more like dreams than stories, they run on their own logic we cannot always understand. I've spent some time in hospital recently and this book was a great escape. I'll second this, they really do feel like dreams I felt like I kind of "woke up" after finishing a story and found myself trying to construct a wider narrative than was presented.
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Read through this on a slow couple days at work and, yeah, I can see how Dunsany is something of an "author's author," who became beloved by a certain strain of writer. It's pleasantly soporific, induces a bit of a hypnotic trance, all elaborate sentence structure and evocative imagery while actively eschewing plot structure in the normal sense. It really is dreamlike, and you can see how a lot of genre literature that could be described as "fantastical" can trace its inspiration back to this through some route or another.
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the goodness of the stories were directly proportional to their literal or metaphorical distance from perfidious albion, op. except for the one where it's mentioned that many of the inhabitants of london have or will die unmourned and unwanted by both heaven and hell for crimes that stain their being in ways that even the beasts of the field can detect
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I guess the call of the ocean being a Thing is just an archetype in that area of the world because that part of Poltarnees gave me major Lord of the Rings flashbacks. Edit: one of the things I like the most about these stories is that the words sound good, if that makes sense? Like just the vocabulary feels pretty to me while I’m reading it. DreamingofRoses fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Suggestions for next month?
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I'm reading The Day of the Triffids for October, might be a fun BotM for spooky season
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How about some Robert Aickman -- Cold Hand in Mine perhaps?
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I've been meaning to read The King in Yellow, if that's not too similar to this month's book.
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Really thought I'd be able to get this one in by the end of the month, but life has really been kicking me in the balls these days. Sorry, Hieronymous. ![]() Edit: My suggestion, as ever, is Ann Petry's The Street. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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# ? Feb 15, 2025 04:29 |
Unless someone changes my mind in the next 24 hours, next month's book will be We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Thanks to Bilirubin for the suggestion!
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