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 2015, refer to archives] 2015: January: Italo Calvino -- Invisible Cities February: Karl Ove Knausgaard -- My Struggle: Book 1. March: Knut Hamsun -- Hunger April: Liu Cixin -- 三体 ( The Three-Body Problem) May: John Steinbeck -- Cannery Row June: Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood (Hiatus) August: Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Between the World and Me September: Wilkie Collins -- The Moonstone October:Seth Dickinson -- The Traitor Baru Cormorant November:Svetlana Alexievich -- Voices from Chernobyl December: Michael Chabon -- Gentlemen of the Road 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 Current: Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens Book available here: https://manybooks.net/titles/chimes https://manybooks.net/titles/cricket-hearth https://manybooks.net/titles/christmas-carol About the book: Charles Dickens wrote more christmas stories than just "Christmas Carol," so let's take this chance to read them. Most of them are kinda crap though so we're going to look at the ones that get talked about : not just Carol, but also "The Chimes" and "The Cricket on the Hearth." They're free, and they're short. About the Author Themes I'll quote extensively from Chesterton's analysis to get us started: quote:It would be hard to find a better example of this than Dickens's great defence of Christmas. In fighting for Christmas he was fighting for the old European festival. Pagan and Christian, for that trinity of eating, drinking and praying which to moderns appears irreverent, for the holy day which is really a holiday. He had himself the most babyish ideas about the past. He supposed the Middle Ages to have consisted of tournaments and torture-chambers, he supposed himself to be a brisk man of the manufacturing age, almost a Utilitarian. But for all that he defended the mediæval feast which was going out against the Utilitarianism which was coming in. He could only see all that was bad in mediævalism. But he fought for all that was good in it. And he was all the more really in sympathy with the old strength and simplicity because he only knew that it was good and did not know that it was old. He cared as little for mediævalism as the mediævals did. He cared as much as they did for lustiness and virile laughter and sad tales of good lovers and pleasant tales of good livers. He would have been very much bored by Ruskin and Walter Pater if they had explained to him the strange sunset tints of Lippi and Botticelli. He had no pleasure in looking on the dying Middle Ages. But he looked on the living Middle Ages, on a piece of the old uproarious superstition still unbroken; and he hailed it like a new religion. The Dickens character ate pudding to an extent at which the modern mediævalists turned pale. They would do every kind of honour to an old observance, except observing it. They would pay to a Church feast every sort of compliment except feasting. G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: Last of the Great Men 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 Reading Go forth, ye merry gentlemen, and google that poo poo Final Note: Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book! (Or, in this case, the short stories).
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# ? Dec 13, 2018 11:40 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 19:35 |
Apologies for the delay in getting this up.
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# ? Dec 13, 2018 11:40 |
It's been a while since I ventured into these threads but before sharing a view of the Christmas novels, I'd like to get in a book request for Jan: Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Or pretty much anything by Chesterton, he's a very interesting writer (I'm aware we did Man Who Was Thursday already but that's such a limited slice of GKC). Alternatively, Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, possibly the funniest book I've ever read (e: There's something naaaarsty in the woodshed).
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# ? Dec 13, 2018 20:01 |
_Napoleon_ has been on my short list for a while yeah. I stayed away from it this past year because of REASONS which may be mostly in my head, and I want to reread it first.
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# ? Dec 14, 2018 16:16 |
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ill write something about the chimes but i wanna talk about her body and other parties at some point as well
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# ? Dec 25, 2018 22:38 |
Yeah, this one didn't get as much activity as I'd hoped, but it got about what I expected =( Need suggestions for next month.
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# ? Dec 27, 2018 17:42 |
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Finding the Cricket very hard reading, just not engaging at all. Other two were ok, I imagine a Christmas carol would have had a better impact if you hadn’t seen the muppets version though.
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# ? Dec 30, 2018 23:27 |
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, this one didn't get as much activity as I'd hoped, but it got about what I expected =( I put a couple suggestions in the suggestions thread
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# ? Dec 31, 2018 18:04 |
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Bilirubin posted:I put a couple suggestions in the suggestions thread what suggestions thread?
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# ? Dec 31, 2018 21:48 |
Tree Goat posted:what suggestions thread? The one stickied at the top of the page
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# ? Jan 1, 2019 00:41 |
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that's a news article about elections in congo my man
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# ? Jan 1, 2019 00:44 |
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oh it’s in the general recommendation thread; i thought there was a botm specific one somewhere
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# ? Jan 1, 2019 01:23 |
A human heart posted:that's a news article about elections in congo my man Jesus H Christ I hate this site sometimes I clicked on the "link to this post" button FML
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# ? Jan 1, 2019 05:33 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 19:35 |
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Bilirubin posted:Jesus H Christ I hate this site sometimes I clicked on the "link to this post" button FML more ppl need to read about the congo anyways so it's all good pal
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# ? Jan 1, 2019 07:10 |