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 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 Current: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Dame Rebecca West The book is available in the following locations: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Lamb-Falcon-Penguin-Classics/dp/014310490X About the book quote:IN 2000, the Modern Library listed Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published in 1941, among the 20th century’s greatest works of nonfiction. Until recently, this was not an extraordinary assertion to make. Geoff Dyer, writing in the Guardian in 2006, called the book “one of the supreme masterpieces of the 20th century.” Ten years ago, Condé Nast Traveler named it among the top 86 travel books of all time. Diana Trilling, speaking after West’s death in 1983, said it was “surely one of the very greatest books of the last 50 years.” Virtually everyone who has read it declares it to be West’s undisputed masterpiece. Richard Tillinghast, writing in The New Criterion in 1992, quotes from a variety of critics: “one of the great travel books of this century,” “one of the great books of our time,” “a major book in every sense.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-judgment-of-rebecca-west/ quote:As a book about Yugoslavia, then, it is of “extraordinary usefulness” - a kind of metaphysical Lonely Planet that never requires updating. (West herself observed, “sometimes it is necessary for us to know where we are in eternity as well as in time”.) The book’s practical worth is nicely suggested by the journalist Robert Kaplan, who remembers taking the book with him everywhere in Yugoslavia. “I would rather have lost my passport and money than my heavily thumbed and annotated copy of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.” quote:Even some commentators who claim the book as a masterpiece have little to say about why it is one. In Abroad, Paul Fussell’s highly regarded survey of “British literary travelling between the wars”, West, unlike Waugh, Lawrence or Greene does not get a chapter-compartment to herself and her book receives a mention more or less in passing. Victoria Glendinning, in her biography of West, has no doubt that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is “the central book of her life ... the work in which Rebecca West formulated her views on religion, ethics, art, myth and gender”. Beyond that, she has almost nothing to say about it. Is the book doomed to repel attempts to articulate the awe that it inspires? About the Author quote:Like the book itself its reputation is rather odd. West is considered a major British writer. If she is not regarded as a writer quite of the first rank that is largely because so much of the work on which her reputation should rest is considered secondary to the forms in which greatness is expected to manifest itself, namely the novel. As a novelist West is clearly less important than James Joyce, Lawrence or EM Forster (“a self-indulgent old liberal with hardly a brain in his head,” as West sharply deemed him). Her best work is scattered among reportage, journalism and travel - the kind of things traditionally regarded as sidelines or distractions. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview2 Themes quote:West’s intention was “to show the past side by side with the present it created” and part of her achievement is to reveal how even an apparently ahistorical sensation - the scent of a plucked flower, say - is saturated with the smell of the past. Geography and history, to make the same point rather more sweepingly, cannot always be distinguished from one another - hence the way that certain places “imprint the same stamp on whatever inhabitants history brings them, even if conquest spills out one population and pours in another wholly different in race and philosophy”. Impatient readers tempted to skip the historical bits are taking a big risk because the past - the narrative history - can melt into the immediate present with zero notice. quote:The gray falcon is an enigmatic figure in a Slav folksong about a military defeat in the year 1389; and it offered the Serbian king a choice which expresses the sad dilemma of modern pacifism and points to its tragic results. The black lamb is the symbol, seen in a gypsy rite in Macedonia, of false -- and thus of impious -- sacrifice; and the terrible complexity of the choice between good and evil becomes not less but more tragic when man identifies himself with the false altar's hapless victim rather than with its cruel priest. For the king chose piety and immolation instead of the effective defense of Christian civilization against its oncoming enemy; "all was holy and honorable" within him, but like the celebrants of false sacrifice, he had set death before life. He and his soldiers died vainly on that consecrated but disastrous battlefield. And slavery closed down upon the Balkan peoples -- no legend here, but history -- for 500 years. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/09/10/specials/west-lamb.html 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 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! Somebody fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Jun 2, 2020 |
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# ? May 4, 2020 16:37 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 03:32 |
every time i get to legitimately use the "falconry" thread tag I consider it a major personal victory
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# ? May 4, 2020 16:38 |
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My copy has the objectively better cover with the icon of St. Pantaleon. It is also a few pages shy of 1200, not counting the bibliography so LMAO
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# ? May 4, 2020 17:15 |
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this book ownsquote:But our boatman plainly wished us to make a move, he kept on looking over his shoulder at the other island, and explaining that the baroque church there was very beautiful, and that many miracles had been performed in it. ‘He does not like us being here,’ I said; ‘perhaps there are snakes.’ There's so much in this, even for a 1000+ page work. West has a wonderful and charming voice which doesn't let up when she's being snobbish in the extreme or racist/homophobic. She's clearly trying though, in a sort of early 20th c. English socialist sort of way? Like when she's grappling with Balkan politics, she seems to start by thinking "right, I'm educated, I know small country politics, think back to the Irish question". And even then she pays attention to the lives and stories of women she meets in a way that I think is probably still fairly rare for travel literature. I found very little of it a slog tbh. Maybe some of the bits about the nitty gritty of icons but every few pages has at least one standout bit of writing, whether it's some sharp observation about the locality or some statement about Art or just a humourous anecdote about Constantin goofing off (or Gerda being lovely). The line about Scots being the only people simultaneously rich and Presbytarian enough to invent the "sober luxury of shortbread" stuck with me, for example.
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# ? May 4, 2020 21:53 |
Ok I'm one percent of the way into this book and this woman has already borne H.G. Well's out-of-wedlock child, I'm impressed
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# ? May 5, 2020 19:06 |
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quote:Even some commentators who claim the book as a masterpiece have little to say about why it is one. Well, gently caress, I have to read it now. That's some grade A snark.
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# ? May 7, 2020 05:16 |
This book is very well written but it does that Grand Pronouncements thing that a lot of pre-ww2 Literary Writers like Chesterton did / do, where they'll say something likequote:When a man takes charge of a factory the factory takes charge of him, if he opens an office it falls into a place in a network that extends over the whole world and so long as he obeys the general trend he will not meet any obvious disaster; but he may be unable to meet the calls that daily life outside this specialist area makes on judgment and initiative. These people fell into that category. Their helplessness was the greater because they had plainly a special talent for obedience. and most of the time she pulls it off and it just sounds like ok, look, she has Wisdom, i will keep reading but then sometimes she'll flop out a paragraph like quote:Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature. And to a modern reader it's just, ok, look, sexism still though when she's on her own ground and making direct observations though she speaks right through the page to the present: quote:At the height of this collective rhapsody the young man with the second-class ticket came back. He had been there for a minute or two before anybody, even the ticket-collector, noticed his presence. He was standing in the middle of the compartment, not even understanding that his seat had been taken, as my husband was at the window, when the business man’s wife became aware of him. ‘Oho-o-o-o!’ she cried with frightful significance; and everybody turned on him with such vehemence that he stood stock-still with amazement, and the ticket-collector had to pull him by the sleeve and tell him to take his luggage and be gone. The vehemence of all four Germans was so intense that we took it for granted that it must be due to some other reason than concern for our comfort, and supposed the explanation lay in the young man’s race and personality, for he was Latin and epicene. His oval olive face was meek with his acceptance of the obligation to please, and he wore with a demure coquetry a suit, a shirt, a tie, socks, gloves, and a hat all in the colours of coffee-and-cream of various strengths. The labels on his suitcase suggested he was either an actor or a dancer, and indeed his slender body was as unnaturally compressed by exercise as by a corset. Under this joint attack he stood quite still with his head down and his body relaxed, not in indifference, but rather because his physical training had taught him to loosen his muscles when he was struck so that he should fall light. There was an air of practice about him, as if he were thoroughly used to being the object of official hostility, and a kind of passive, not very noble fortitude; he was quite sure he would survive this, and would be able to walk away unhurt. We were distressed, but could not believe we were responsible, since the feeling of the Germans was so passionate; and indeed this young man was so different from them that it was conceivable they felt as hippopotami at the Zoo might feel if a cheetah were introduced into their cage. quote:Then came a climactic mystification. There came along the first Yugoslavian ticket-collector, a red-faced, ugly, amiable Croat. The Germans all held out their tickets, and lo and behold! They were all second-class. My husband and I gaped in bewilderment. It made the campaign they had conducted against the young man in coffee-and-cream clothes completely incomprehensible and not at all pleasing. If they had been nasty people it would have been natural enough; but they were not at all nasty, they loved each other, tranquillity, snow, and their national history. Nevertheless they were unabashed by the disclosure of what my husband and I considered the most monstrous perfidy. I realized that if I had said to them, ‘You had that young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket,’ they would have nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ and if I had gone on and said, ‘But you yourselves have only second-class tickets,’ they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:02 on May 9, 2020 |
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# ? May 9, 2020 15:58 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:And to a modern reader it's just, ok, look, sexism Yeah, West is pretty essentialist about sex and gender in general, whatever her other progressive/feminist bonafides. Women are like this, they are important, men are like that, they are also important. Same as whenever she talks about homosexuality, she seems to bring it up as part of these big sweeping statements about cultures, what this says about their manhood, their cultural vigour or whatever. Again that essentialism, Serbs are like this, Croats are like that, etc. Definitely a very early 20th century attitude. Still makes for some zingers though, like the bit about how she'll believe feminism has achieved its goals when a woman as bald and clownish as d'Annunzio can run a city. A lot of those Grand Pronouncements really are beautifully put, even when they almost contradict other things West put out. Like this quote:Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book. is good stuff but then when West is feeling morose at Frushka Gora, talking about tzar Lazar's death, we get quote:Art covers not even a corner of life, only a knot or two here and there, far apart and without relation to the pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order and beauty to the whole of that vast and intractable fabric, that sail flapping in the contrary winds of the universe? which is also very good stuff. Incidentally while searching for those I found this not far from the first quote: quote:English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer. lol. West might have been aware but she wasn't immune.
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# ? May 11, 2020 15:00 |
Am I the only guy reading this this month sorry folks I thought a travelogue would be good since we're quarantined
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# ? May 20, 2020 04:13 |
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I only started it yesterday. I've had much less energy and time for reading than I thought.
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# ? May 20, 2020 14:13 |
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It may be that West is such a superbly self-confident writer that there is not a lot one can do with it apart from marvel. I haven't read it for at least 15 years, and can't find my copy (early edition, two volumes), which is a pity. But I do remember not just the grand set-pieces, like the visit of the Turkish envoys to Sarajevo, the Montenegrin track that would have led them to their doom; the sacrifice of the lamb, and perhaps the central horror of the book, Gerda grabbing the bowl of eggs at the Easter Service. In which she proves her unfitness for the world of art and the world of myth. But also little scenes and phrases that have stayed with me: the drunken officer 'with his legs at the other end of the world' while someone tenderly holds his head while he's being sick into the gutter; 'the dusty, fly-blown waking dream of Turkey-in-Europe'. I love it and if I can't find it then I shall have to get another copy. I's not really a travelogue, either, more an enormous vehicle for her world-view. I do know that she was actually planning to set it in Finland first, and had even started leaning Finnish, but got sent to YU for a book tour or or something, and fell in love. And fell out of love after the war, when Tito took over. The fact that it was banned there for ethno-nationalism and didn't get translated and published in full until 2004 might also have had something to do with it And Constantine was definitely Stanislav Vinaver, who was a parodist, poet and translator, and an actually important figure at the time. Here's the cover of his 1922 Nova Pantologija Pelengirike, which I suppose you might translate as A New Pantsology, which is full of parodies of poets and novelists of the time, none of which I can really understand almost a century later and not being a native speaker.
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# ? May 20, 2020 14:26 |
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Oh, and it's pretty much accepted that she was having an affair with Vinaver on at least one of the three trips she made to write the book. So Gerda/Ilsa's foulness might not be quite as simple as represented. There are also bits when she simply betrays her ignorance, as when she builds a complaint about failure to understand foreign languages by Brits when she is at the Trepča mine in Kosovo, and she sees a sign saying Stanterg, which she interprets as a misreading of Stari Trg (Old Market). But Stantërg is the Albanian name for Trepča. And the almost total absence of Albanians in the book apart from flower sellers, sweetmeat makers and people luxuriously resting in the shade is weird too. I may be wrong on the precise details, as this is all from memory, but I will say that it's a book that stays with you for a very long time.
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# ? May 21, 2020 23:22 |
https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1264661413227827201?s=20
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# ? May 25, 2020 00:05 |
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This thread provided the kick in the butt I needed to pick up my copy of the book again. I read about half of it in 2008 but never finished it, not because it's not good (it is) but because it's such a beast of a book and at the time I was only reading for pleasure when commuting. We're still in Dalmatia over here, so I don't anticipate finishing this read-through until probably July. I find it hard to put my thoughts on this book into words, for some reason. It's just so... vast in scope? One thing however that stayed with me since the first read and that I'm appreciating now again is the attention she pays to the women and their fates when she digs into the history of places (for example Galeria Valeria and Anna Comnena). That, West's essentialist sexism, and her frankly rather accurate zingers like this one (mentioned by another poster): quote:I will believe that the battle of feminism is over, and that the female has reached a position of equality with the male, when I hear that a country has allowed itself to be turned upside-down and led to the brink of war by its passion for a totally bald woman writer. sitnalisa posted:Interesting stuff
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# ? May 25, 2020 09:36 |
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Yeah, the book is vast. I just finished the Shestine chapter, which is nice and lyrical until it's not. I am barely a hundred pages into the book.
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# ? May 25, 2020 10:52 |
I got to the part where she describes the city of Rab and decided to look it up online for pictures:
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# ? May 25, 2020 16:44 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Am I the only guy reading this this month It sounds like a really interesting book, but a 1000 pages is a lot of pages.
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# ? May 27, 2020 14:06 |
When she gets to talking about the split, Italy and the palace of Diocletian:quote:“ I would like to go into the palace at once,” said my That book is online here: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/DLDecArts/DLDecArts-idx?type=header;pview=hide;id=DLDecArts.AdamRuins The wanton trollop she mentions: That same location today: Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 00:39 on May 29, 2020 |
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# ? May 29, 2020 00:37 |
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holy poo poo, great encapsulation of the book as a whole right there, all the best and worst
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# ? May 29, 2020 00:56 |
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Hmm. But an improvement on previous travellers: from Through Savage Europe by Harry de Windt, a former British officer visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1905 or 6. At this time Bosnia and Herzegovina was occupied by Austria-Hungary, and we all know how well that turned out. edit: someone help me with the picture pls sitnalisa fucked around with this message at 17:00 on May 29, 2020 |
# ? May 29, 2020 15:59 |
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You're trying to embed the page the picture is on instead of the picture itself. I would do it, but Imgur is blocked on my work computer.
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# ? May 29, 2020 16:42 |
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Thank you! fixed.
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# ? May 29, 2020 17:01 |
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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. A Prince of Swindlers is a bunch of short stories about a master thief scamming and robbing the upper social classes in 1890's London. -it is copyright expired everywhere -it is freely available online via project gutenberg or archive dot org -there is a Sherlock Holmes analogy/parody character in it -100% of the scams & schemes & robberies in it operate on completely different logic than what a modern crime-heist story or a crime-heist story published in the past 55 years would use
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# ? May 30, 2020 16:45 |
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. Remind me for next month's poll
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# ? May 30, 2020 16:51 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 03:32 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Remind me for next month's poll Will do, if I remember 26 days from now. Think we went through this loop before.
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# ? May 30, 2020 16:58 |