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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 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 September:A Dreamer's Tales by Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany October:We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson November:Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers December:Hogfather by Terry Pratchett 2022: January: The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway February: Les Contes Drolatiques by Honore de Balzac Current:  Depeche Mode by Serhiy Zhadan Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/Depeche-Mode-Serhiy-Zhadan/dp/1909156841 About the book quote:In 1993, tragic turbulence takes over Ukraine in the post-communist spin-off. As if in somnambulism, Soviet war veterans and upstart businessmen listen to an American preacher of whose type there were plenty at the time in the post-Soviet territory. In Kharkiv, the young communist headquarters is now an advertising agency, and a youth radio station brings Western music, with Depeche Mode in the lead, into homes of ordinary people. In the middle of this craze three friends, an anti-Semitic Jew Dogg Pavlov, an unfortunate entrepreneur Vasia the Communist and the narrator Zhadan, nineteen years of age and unemployed, seek to find their old pal Sasha Carburetor to tell him that his step-father shot himself dead. Characters confront elements of their reality, and, tainted with traumatic survival fever, embark on a sad, dramatic and a bit grotesque adventure. quote:
quote:A poet and novelist whose work has been variously compared to Rimbaud, Charles Bukowski and Irvine Welsh, Serhiy Zhadan’s first novel Depeche Mode depicts Ukrainian youth during the turbulent 1990s. Described by the author as “a book about real male comradeship,” the novel follows the unemployed narrator and his friends, Jewish anti-Semite Dogg Pavlov and Vasia the Communist, on their adventures around Kharkiv and beyond. About the author quote:Zhadan is an internationally known Ukrainian writer, with 12 books of poetry and 7 novels, and winner of more than a dozen literary awards. In March 2008, the Russian translation of his novel Anarchy in the UKR made the shortlist of the National Bestseller Prize. It was also a contender for "Book of the Year" at the 2008 Moscow International Book Exhibition. In 2009 he won the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski Literary Prize. In 2012 Gunshot and Knife won Ukrainian rating "Book of the Year" for fiction. His 2010 novel Voroshylovhrad won him the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in Switzerland, BBC Ukrainian's "Book of the Decade" award and Brücke Berlin Prize. His selected poems Dynamo Kharkiv won Ukrainian "Book of the Year." (2014) His book Mesopotamia won the Angelus literature prize in 2015, the Award of the President of Ukraine "Ukrainian Book of the Year" in 2016. quote:Zhadan's active involvement in Ukrainian nationalism began while a student and has continued throughout the various political crises in Ukraine. In 1992 he was one of the organizers of Kharkiv neo-futuristic literary group "The Red Thistle".[3][4] He participated in the 2004 Orange Revolution demonstrations against corruption and voter intimidation in the presidential run-off elections, was the commandant of a tent camp in Kharkiv. The protests resulted in a revote ordered by Ukraine's Supreme Court. He has repeatedly expressed sympathy for anarchists, and in many of his works there are "left" motives.[5][6] 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.complete-review.com/reviews/ukraine/zhadans.htm 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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Mar 6, 2022 02:15
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1xrNaTO1bI
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Mar 6, 2022 16:18
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Started it today, it’s good. I’ll post more later when I have something substantial to say.
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Mar 6, 2022 20:50
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https://twitter.com/TsurkanKate/status/1500770393753280514?s=20&t=YjLcq8-N0tjS8AjWxrK5og
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Mar 7, 2022 12:31
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I just ordered it, but it's not slated to arrive until next month.
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Mar 10, 2022 02:26
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Bought it today, will start as soon as I'm done with what I'm currently reading. As someone who only experienced the wild privatisation of the nineties as a kid (and in the much more peaceful Czechia), this is a really interesting setting.
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Mar 10, 2022 13:31
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I'm willing to try to get to this one but I've already got a horrible backlog.
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Mar 12, 2022 16:45
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Author is in Kharkiv and tweeting every day, found his twitter https://twitter.com/serhiy_zhadan/status/1505860714589827074?s=20&t=HIHb0N-uecsm5InSDUHZmg https://twitter.com/serhiy_zhadan/status/1505582586634063876?s=20&t=HIHb0N-uecsm5InSDUHZmg Anyway I finally got started reading this book and it's fuckin' great. Wonderfully shattered humor. Reminds me a bit of Joseph Heller.
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Mar 21, 2022 12:24
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I loved the scene with the preacher and interpreter, both for the hilarity and the fact it rings so true. I do remember the pre-widespread-Internet days when translation was basically considered a freeform discipline and concepts the translator didn't understand were mercilessly cut out or turned into something else entirely.
anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 12:30 on Mar 21, 2022 |
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Mar 21, 2022 12:27
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anilEhilated posted:I loved the scene with the preacher and interpreter, both for the hilarity and the fact it rings so true. I do remember the pre-widespread-Internet days when translation was basically considered a freeform discipline and concepts the translator didn't understand were mercilessly cut out or turned into something else entirely. Yeah up till then I was reading along but that whole sequence was what made me 100% sold on the book. ""How they played! Like gods! That is, they were hardly faking it at all."
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Mar 21, 2022 12:41
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I finished Depche Mode honestly one of the weirder books I have read.
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Mar 30, 2022 01:51
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Lawman 0 posted:I finished Depche Mode honestly one of the weirder books I have read. I'm still moving through it. Really enjoying it so far but yeah it kinda seems like a book where you just let the vibe wash over you. April's book will be Kalpa Imperial. I'll get a thread up todayish sometime.
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Apr 1, 2022 07:07
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I’m just kind of delaying ending it and the cast of characters really grew on me. I can also recognize the vibe in the book, having lived through the post-socialist transition at roughly the same age as the characters. There really wasn’t anything else to do but to get into these kinds of dumb schemes and drink.
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Apr 1, 2022 07:28
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I really enjoyed the long chapter. A lot. The others were just "meh" which overall averages to OK for the book as a whole. I did not, however, enjoy the chapter that reminded me of when the BOTM was that godawful book about rocket fuel.
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Apr 1, 2022 07:43
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Next month is up here: https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1510760367751843850?s=20&t=pk6-Thtk-Od5fNvRQxpLvA I'm still reading this month also though! I'll keep posting my thoughts as I move forward
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Apr 4, 2022 00:26
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I'm still working my way through this when I remember to take my Kindle with me when I expect work downtime. I'm really enjoying it. Most of the time it has that beat-writer cinema verite feel, here's a vibe, let's live it, no judgment just vibes feel, and then every so often the layers of sarcasm build up and punch through and snap at you; you have to have a lot of heart to write this cynically Author is still alive in Kharkiv and tweeting regularly. https://twitter.com/olgatokariuk/status/1515048516187574284?s=20&t=-s9Xtg0JX4oaojKooE7etg https://twitter.com/solsticelitmag/status/1517465749463437313?s=20&t=-s9Xtg0JX4oaojKooE7etg https://twitter.com/Kateryna_Kruk/status/1515743551757463559?s=20&t=-s9Xtg0JX4oaojKooE7etg
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Apr 23, 2022 16:27
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The style of Depeche Mode is very common in Eastern European fiction of the era. It is a reflection of the poverty in which most of the authors had to live after the old system crumbled. Definitely a product of the transition. However, our friend Serhiy does it better than most. It’s interesting HA linked it to the Italian neo-realism, because the material environment in which it sprung up is very similar.
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Apr 24, 2022 07:32
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I finally finished this earlier today. Excellent book, I found it hard to put down while I was reading it but hard to pick up again each time too. Overall I think my favorite section was the pamphlet.
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May 3, 2022 03:52
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It's really interesting in retrospect comparing the absolute cynicism of this book with the absolute optimism of the author today https://twitter.com/serhiy_zhadan/status/1524715933939474433?s=20&t=bhhfEeyWacnvYZL3w--iUQ
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May 12, 2022 12:47
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