BOTM Poll: SEVEN choices for SEPTEMBER!

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please read a book with us together books fun This poll is closed.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson	7	11.67%
The Curse of Capistrano (AKA The Mark of Zorro) by Johnston McCulley	7	11.67%
3) You Can't Win by Jack Black	8	13.33%
4 "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes" by Ella Cheever Thayer.	10	16.67%
5 Letters of Insurgents by Fredy Perlman	5	8.33%
6 Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay	15	25.00%
7 How to Mellify a Corpse by Vicki Le�n	8	13.33%
Total:	31 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

Please vote for all the books you would like to read -- you can vote for more than one!

1) Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

quote:

Stevenson conceived the idea of Treasure Island (originally titled, The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys) from a map of an imaginary, romantic island idly drawn by Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne on a rainy day in Braemar, Scotland. Stevenson had just returned from his first stay in America, with memories of poverty, illness, and adventure (including his recent marriage), and a warm reconciliation between his parents had been established. Stevenson himself said in designing the idea of the story that, "It was to be a story for boys; no need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be a touchstone. Women were excluded... and then I had an idea for Long John Silver from which I promised myself funds of entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine... to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, and to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin." Completing 15 chapters in as many days, Stevenson was interrupted by illness and, after leaving Scotland, continued working on the first draft outside London.

2) The Curse of Capistrano (AKA The Mark of Zorro) by Johnston McCulley

quote:

Zorro (Spanish for "Fox") is a fictional character created in 1919 by American pulp writer Johnston McCulley, and appearing in works set in the Pueblo of Los Angeles during the era of Spanish California (1769�1821). He is typically portrayed as a dashing masked vigilante who defends the commoners and indigenous peoples of California against corrupt and tyrannical officials and other villains. His signature all-black costume includes a cape, a hat known as a sombrero cordob�s, and a mask covering the upper half of his face.
. . .

Zorro made his debut in the 1919 novel The Curse of Capistrano, originally meant as a stand-alone story. However, the success of the 1920 film adaptation The Mark of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks convinced McCulley to write more Zorro stories for about four decades: the character was featured in a total of five serialized stories and 57 short stories, the last one appearing in print posthumously in 1959, the year after his death. The Curse of Capistrano eventually sold more than 50 million copies, becoming one of the most sold books of all time.
. . .

Being one of the earliest examples of a fictional masked avenger with a double identity, Zorro inspired the creation of several similar characters in pulp magazines and other media, and is a precursor of the superheroes of American comic books, with Batman drawing particularly close parallels to the character.

3) You Can't Win by Jack Black

quote:

You Can't Win is an autobiography by burglar and hobo Jack Black, written in the early to mid-1920s and first published in 1926. It describes Black's life on the road, in prison and his various criminal capers in the American and Canadian west from the late 1880s to early 20th century. The book was a major influence upon William S. Burroughs and other Beat writers. It was made into a film in 2015.

quote:

My background is crowded with robberies, burglaries, and thefts too numerous to recall. All manner of crimes against property. Arrests, trials, acquittals, convictions, escapes. Penitentiaries! I see in the background four of them. County jails, workhouses, city prisons, Mounted Police barracks, dungeons, solitary confinement, bread and water, hanging up, brutal floggings, and the murderous straitjacket. I see hop joints, wine dumps, thieves' resorts, and beggars' hangouts. Crime followed by swift retribution in one form or another. I had very few glasses of wine as I traveled this route. I rarely saw a woman smile and seldom heard a song. In those twenty-five years I took all these things, and I am going to write about them. And I am going to write about them as I took them - with a smile.

4 "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes" by Ella Cheever Thayer.

Epicurius posted:

Recommending "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes" by Ella Cheever Thayer. It's a romance novel from the 19th century about a telegraph operator who falls in love with another telegraph operator.

It's not the type of book that usually gets read here, but I'm recommending it anyway, if for no other reason than because it's very much a 19th century version of the "love on the internet " story, and it deals with stuff like the question of whether an electronic relationship is the same as an in person one, catfishing, and a whole lot of other stuff that seems remarkably current.

5 Letters of Insurgents by Fredy Perlman

Baka-nin posted:

Letters of Insurgents by Fredy Perlman, free copies are easy to find, including an audiobook. Its about revolution and freedom takes place both in Cold War Eastern Europe and the US during the protest movement. It covers and explores nearly every type of left wing group and some of the political right and has a really interesting way of developing its characters over time.

quote:

As we go to press in late June, we are receiving reports of discussion groups formed around the country, in person and in on-line blogs, that are reading Fredy Perlman�s 1976 historical novel, Letters of Insurgents, published by Detroit�s Black & Red.

One reader, DeAnna Tibbs, described the book as consisting of �fictional letters between two Eastern European workers, Yarostan Vochek and Sophia Nachalo, separated by twenty-five years and two continents. As they reconnect through an exchange of letters, we learn about the battles they have fought�physical, political, emotional, and moral�and eventually the ones they have left to fight.�

Another says, �It makes me cry and laugh like no other book. It is filled with fictional versions of real historical upheavals in the middle third of the 20th century, depicting them in vivid and personal ways that grow out of the characters� lives.�

What Wilhelm Reich called the emotional plague�the constellation of sexual repression and misery, patriotism, conformity, and authoritarian character armor�is thoroughly studied, in its Bolshevik as well as Western forms.

Also considered is how the emotional plague can lose its grip on us, how rebellion and liberation can become contagious and spread in a wildfire of subversion; but also how the dynamics of this plague reconstituting itself is crucial in the death of liberated situations.

Fredy Perlman was a participant in the May �68 uprising in France. He was involved with an early radical student newspaper in the height of McCarthy-era Los Angeles in the late 1950s. He was associated with the Living Theater in New York City in the early 1960s, and lived and studied in Belgrade, Yugoslavia from 1963-66.

6 picnic at hanging rock, joan lindsay.

quote:

Picnic at Hanging Rock is an Australian historical fiction novel by Joan Lindsay. Set in 1900, it is about a group of female students at an Australian girls' boarding school who vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine's Day picnic, and the effects the disappearances have on the school and local community. The novel was first published in 1967 in Australia by Cheshire Publishing and was reprinted by Penguin in 1975. It is widely considered by critics to be one of the best Australian novels.

Although the events depicted in the novel are entirely fictional, it is framed as though it is a true story, corroborated by ambiguous pseudohistorical references. Its irresolute conclusion has sparked significant public, critical, and scholarly analysis, and the narrative has become a part of Australia's national folklore as a result. Lindsay claimed to have written the novel over two weeks at her home Mulberry Hill in Baxter, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, after having successive dreams of the narrated events.

chernobyl kinsman posted:

picnic at hanging rock, joan lindsay. classic of australian lit, credited with essentially creating the country's film industry, spooky, short, should be in every library.

7 How to Mellify a Corpse: And Other Human Stories of Ancient Science & Superstition

quote:

In How to Mellify a Corpse, Vicki Le�n brings her particular hybrid of history and humor to the entwined subjects of science and superstition in the ancient world, from Athens and Rome to Mesopotamia, the Holy Land, Egypt, and Carthage. Le�n covers subjects as diverse as astronomy and astrology, philosophy and practicalities of life and death (including the titular ancient method of embalming), and ancient mechanical engineering. How to Mellify a Corpse of course invokes legendary thinkers (Pythagoras and his discoveries in math and music, Aristotle's books on politics and philosophy, and Archimedes' "Eureka" moment), but it also delves deeply into the lives of everyday people, their understanding and beliefs.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Aug 27, 2019

# ? Aug 27, 2019 02:19

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# ? May 5, 2024 04:54

Tree Goat: May 24, 2009; argania spinosa

treasure island and zorro but no prisoner of zenda i see... troubling, troubling

# ? Aug 28, 2019 03:08

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

Tree Goat posted:

treasure island and zorro but no prisoner of zenda i see... troubling, troubling

You joke but I was *this* close to adding it, seriously, but we were already at seven

I was browsing Standard Ebooks sorted by reading difficulty and it's on the second page: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/?page=2&sort=reading-ease

Thing is though we already have a great running active Let's Read thread on the Flashman books (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3894423 ) and the second one of those is a Prisoner of Zenda knockoff, so I figured it might be worth waiting and doing it in a later month when that thread's further along

# ? Aug 28, 2019 03:14

Tree Goat: May 24, 2009; argania spinosa

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

You joke but I was *this* close to adding it, seriously, but we were already at seven

I was browsing Standard Ebooks sorted by reading difficulty and it's on the second page: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/?page=2&sort=reading-ease

Thing is though we already have a great running active Let's Read thread on the Flashman books (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3894423 ) and the second one of those is a Prisoner of Zenda knockoff, so I figured it might be worth waiting and doing it in a later month when that thread's further along

that's okay; it'd only be scoffed at by all the rupert of hentzau-heads anyway

# ? Aug 28, 2019 03:40

Antivehicular: Dec 30, 2011; I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

My votes are for Wired Love, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and How to Mellify a Corpse.

# ? Aug 29, 2019 05:36

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

Antivehicular posted:

My votes are for Wired Love, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and How to Mellify a Corpse.

did you vote in the actual poll?

# ? Aug 29, 2019 21:00

MockingQuantum: Jan 20, 2012

Well my library hold on Picnic at Hanging Rock just got fulfilled so I hope it's that one

# ? Aug 29, 2019 21:07

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

MockingQuantum posted:

Well my library hold on Picnic at Hanging Rock just got fulfilled so I hope it's that one

you've uncovered my secret plan my hope with the polls is always that people read all of them

# ? Aug 29, 2019 21:11

Antivehicular: Dec 30, 2011; I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

did you vote in the actual poll?

I, uh, was on mobile and didn't see there was a poll -- oops. I'll fix that next time I'm on an actual browser.

# ? Aug 30, 2019 01:13

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# ? May 5, 2024 04:54

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, i've been on the road so couldn't get a thread up. It'll be Picnic at Hanging Rock. Thread will be up later today.

# ? Sep 3, 2019 13:20

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > BOTM Poll: SEVEN choices for SEPTEMBER!