Awful Book Poll: Pick the May Book of the Month

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Which book? Boooooooook? This poll is closed.
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.	11	30.56%
Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen.	3	8.33%
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss.	3	8.33%
Imperial Life In The Emerald City (Inside Iraq's Green Zone) by Rajiv Chandrasekaran	3	8.33%
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez	12	33.33%
On the Beach by Nevile Shute.	4	11.11%
Total:	36 votes

[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Ok, here are the poll options for next month's book of the month. Vote early, vote often! As always, though, please only vote if you plan on actually reading that book and posting something about it afterwards in the thread.. Doesn't have to be a witty or brilliant comment or anything, "this book was too loving long" or whatever is fine, just please if you vote for a book think of it as making some minimal commitment to actually participate in next month's thread if that book is selected. Thanks!

1) A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

I'll let Zinn describe his work in his own words:

quote:

My history... describes the inspiring struggle of those who have fought slavery and racism (Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses), of the labor organizers who have led strikes for the rights of working people (Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, C�sar Ch�vez), of the socialists and others who have protested war and militarism (Eugene V. Debs, Helen Keller, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Cindy Sheehan). My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain, who denounced the massacre and satirized imperialism.[5][6]

I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring, and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of us have an equal right to �life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.� The history of our country, I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make those ideals a reality � and all of us, of whatever age, can find immense satisfaction in becoming part of that.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_United_States

I think this would be a great way to have a discussion of American history in TBB using Zinn as a starting point. It's a fairly short, readable book, and the whole thing available online for free here because Zinn is a literal communist and therefore cool with that.

2) Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen.

Gonna quote forum poster Dogcrash Truther on this one, as his post convinced me to buy a copy:

quote:

I didn't know until the Times Magazine article came out that his 1975 novel Far Tortuga was his favorite of his books, but I was happy to find out, because it's my favorite of his books, too. It's one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've ever had -- maybe the most satisfying. Deeply experimental without being at all pretentious, Far Tortuga tells the story of a crew of turtle fishers sailing around the West Indies in 1966 in search of green turtle.

The text of the book owes as much to concrete poetry as it does to traditional novel styles: words are arranged on the page to suggest motion, give information about time and place, and to suggest relationships between characters and objects. There are no attributions to the dialogue, so if you haven't been reading William Gaddis recently, you might start out feeling kind of lost, but if you just allow yourself to be steeped in the language, it is not difficult to determine who is talking from context. Beyond the text itself, diagrams and abstract sumi-e inspired images help complete the story. In the hands of a lesser writer, all of these choices might just seem like gimmicks, or might make the book feel too intellectual, but Matthiessen grounds the techniques in the day-to-day lives of his characters and in the natural world around them, so that far from feeling experimental, these innovations feel absolutely necessary to capture the immediacy of the world he's describing.

Far Tortuga also anchors itself to traditional literature by being in every respect a sea adventure, worthy to stand alongside Moby Dick as a classic of the genre: the overbearing, troubled captain, the funny, heroic, occasionally despicable crew, the struggle between fathers and sons, the existential, moral, political and metaphysical dimensions of being alone on the ocean, (to borrow a phrase from Robinson Jeffers) earnest creatures going about their business among the equally earnest elements of nature -- it's all in there.

I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Far Tortuga is a rarely-read book that really deserves more recognition. If anyone else has read it, I'd love to actually have someone to discuss it with.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3626303

I think this sounds like a good pick but I haven't read it yet myself and we do already have a thread about it, so making it a BotM selection might not be necessary. Still it's definitely on my list for the next month and maybe y'all would like to have it on yours as well.

3) The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss.

quote:

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo is a 2012 biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas written by Tom Reiss. The book presents the life and career of Dumas as a soldier and officer during the French Revolution, as well as his military service in Italy during the French Revolutionary Wars and later in Egypt under Napoleon. Reiss offers insight into slavery and the life of a man of mixed race during the French Colonial Empire. He also reveals how Dumas's son � author Alexandre Dumas � viewed his father, who served as the inspiration for some of his novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

The Black Count won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, among other awards and honors.

This recommendation came from the history books thread and I think would be neat if we wanted to do a biography this month. We could also do some compare & contrast with Dumas' various works and we could branch out into discussion of those as well.

4) Imperial Life In The Emerald City (Inside Iraq's Green Zone) by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

quote:

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone is a 2006 book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that takes a critical look at the civilian leadership of the American reconstruction project in Iraq. Centered mainly on the actions of the Coalition Provisional Authority, within the Green Zone of Baghdad, Chandrasekaran details the events from the end of the invasion phase of the war until the official transfer of power to the Iraqis and the growing insurgency in the country.

In the prologue to the book, Chandrasekaran states that his work does not take a side for or against the United States' invasion of Iraq, simply treating it as a given, and instead focuses purely on examining how the post-invasion occupation was handled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Life_in_the_Emerald_City

This was suggested and looks like a good way to go if we want to try a current events type discussion. I haven't read it so don't know much beyond what's in the wiki summary.

5) 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

quote:

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien a�os de soledad) is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buend�a family, whose patriarch, Jos� Arcadio Buend�a, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia.

The widely acclaimed book, considered by many to be the author's masterpiece, was first published in Spanish in 1967, and subsequently has been translated into thirty-seven languages and has sold more than 30 million copies.[1][2][3] The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important, representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s,[4] which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Vanguard) literary movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude

This would be a timely pick since Marquez just died but I'm not sure we actually need to make it the Book of the Month since we already have a good Marquez thread running and people have already read it. On the other hand, it might be useful to have a group discussion, especially if we can get people comparing the different translations with the original.

6) On the Beach by Nevile Shute.

quote:

On the Beach is a 1957 post-apocalyptic novel written by British-Australian author Nevil Shute after he immigrated to Australia. The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the northern hemisphere following a nuclear war a year previously. As the radiation approaches each person deals with their impending death in different ways.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)

This last one is crazy depressing. If it wins again this month I'll make it the selection but oh god so depressing. Do you all really want to read this? Really? I have enough despair in my life as it is! It is a very good book though.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Apr 28, 2014

# ? Apr 28, 2014 01:28

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# ? May 5, 2024 03:16

Paper With Lines: Aug 21, 2013; The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!

I voted for 100 Years of Solitude but that is because I've already read Zinn's book. I would also probably buy and read Reiss's book about Dumas.

Thanks for posting this thread in either the D&D or SAL book thread (I don't remember which recruited me) but I would love to participate.

# ? Apr 29, 2014 03:55

Wungus: Mar 5, 2004

I picked On The Beach again, but I'd love to give Far Tortuga a shot too. 100 Years is one of my favorite books, but I don't really feel like reading it for a fourth time just yet, and the others are nonfiction things which ehhh, I really have to be in the mood for. I'm in the middle of The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King, and I just don't want to jump from there to another nonfiction piece.

# ? Apr 30, 2014 14:34

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

And it's neck and neck heading down the home stretch!

Theoretically I suppose we could do a split BotM, one fiction and one nonfiction.

# ? Apr 30, 2014 22:09

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

And it's Marquez by the nose! People's History will likely get another shot next month.

# ? May 1, 2014 16:59

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Awful Book Poll: Pick the May Book of the Month