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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 the moderation team. 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 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  Current: Strange Hotel, by Eimear McBride Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y73QK2P/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 About the book quote:Strange Hotel feels like a book determined to show just how different it is from its predecessors. An unnamed 35-year-old woman checks into a hotel in Avignon; over the years, we’ll meet her in several more – in Prague, Oslo, Auckland and Austin. She monitors her desire to drink, to have casual sex, and to not quite look at her own past. She is haunted by a lost love, and these encounters with others – or mostly, really, with herself – in these anonymous rooms bring painful flashes of that former relationship. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/28/eimear-mcbride-strange-hotel-review quote:The accretion of detail, of nuance, of language are at the heart of McBride’s work. And Strange Hotel, her third book, is a powerful demonstration of her ability to marshal words to peerless effect ... This first section is rich in suspense, confidently cut through with an absurd humour ... McBride cleverly drip-feeds information, rounding out her character, probing her damaged self and exploring what might have caused her to be roaming the world’s hotels, engaging in an endless stream of one-night stands ... the simplicity of the tale belies the deep psychological complexity it explores ... McBride’s fractured, fluid indirect style captures the newness of past events, constantly alive in the mind ... The language is...tortured—if exquisitely deployed ... Once inside the discursive thought process of this woman, her sadness, trauma, loneliness and grief come fully alive ... Strange Hotel is a finely controlled, complex and emotionally absorbing novel that manages to burrow deep into the heart of something essential about the human experiences of love and loss. That’s quite an achievement in so short a work. About the Author quote:Eimear McBride (born 1976) is an Irish novelist whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.[1][2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eimear_McBride 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Girl_Is_a_Half-formed_Thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lesser_Bohemians 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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Sep 2, 2020 01:07
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everyone who is not on discord please join the discord because I do not want to talk about this good book on this bad site god bless
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Sep 2, 2020 20:18
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Mel Mudkiper posted:everyone who is not on discord please join the discord because I do not want to talk about this good book on this bad site god bless I hope this isn't the effort post you promised me Mel
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Sep 3, 2020 14:51
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Something I really love about this, as it starts, is the transition from suspense to reality. In the first one or two hotels there's obviously something the character is holding back, some secret, something about their identity, something they refuse to engage with. It creates a quite tense situation where you're waiting for the information to come to you, to allow you to build up ideas of who or what she actually is. As the book progresses, and as you get a few more solid things to base your perception on you realise she's not anything mysterious. There are questions to be answered, but there's no "trick" in this. The hesitancy in revealing a self, is not so much a trick of the author in building suspense, but an actual facet of the person in refusing to address their life. This could be obvious straight from the start, with the prose—deep within a mind—telling you it's a mental withholding rather than an authorial one, but the slow eking away at the reader's perception of the character, as you come to know the woman and all her refusals-in-thought brings you to a point where you accept her tangency-in-thought and realise this is a whole person, just a damaged person. That trick/twist/slip from the first chapter or two, where you question who this person is, to the middle chapters/hotels where you become embedded in her thought is absolutely brilliant from McBride. It's this use of thinking from the author in the protagonist that sets up the entire novel (a short one) where each stage/section of the book/hotel stay, coming into the next and leaving the former behind, allows you to slowly find out more about what's true and not, and even accept that maybe truth isn't the most important aspect of getting to know the character, rather the mental state they occupy! It's a masterclass in prose achieving more than the actual story beats, and something any aspiring author should look at to see how the way-of-writing can effect things, and for any reader to see how the rhythm of language, use of whirling, stuttering thought, and simple observations by a character reflected in the prose can do so much more than some high adventure or twist in a plot.
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Sep 3, 2020 14:52
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The end made me smile. I flipped to the beginning again and got a lot more out of reviewing the initial list of cities than when I first read it. I liked how the novel explored alienation and the in-between from both the spaces of interchangeable hotels and from the narrator's relations to others across her life. It did affect me how long the narrator spent away from herself in the course of the two decades or so the book covers. The prose was excellent, one bit in particular just stunned me: "Outside the sky's a horror of fight and bruise. Velour black, pumped with racket, gored by orange." I've abandoned a few books lately that I couldn't get into, with overly long sentences and overly bleak subject matter, so I really appreciated McBride's varying the pace and density of her prose. Every element worked towards an end. This gets into the length of the book, which I also appreciate. McBride said what she wanted to say and any longer would have been unnecessary. Health Services fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Sep 8, 2020 |
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Sep 8, 2020 16:27
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I've said it before but this book is worthy of reading entirely aloud
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Sep 8, 2020 17:07
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Effort Post 1: The Hotel and the Self I often struggle to enjoy metaphors and symbols in stories. Often, they draw too much attention to themselves, or, instead, act as a sort of scavenger hunt of meaning that evokes the more tedious elements of a high school English class. I argue, as a reader, that a message is best served as an essence rather than as a symbol, of the physical object inhabiting the same mental space as the idea. In that way, the object is not a symbol for an experience, but instead the experience itself. It is in this area that the novel exceeds. What I would like to focus on in this post is the essence of the hotel room, and how it is, primarily, a reflection of the existence of living within ones own mind. I have done a great deal of traveling, and always preferring to travel by car, I spend a lot of time alone in hotel rooms when traveling. To spend a night in a hotel, by yourself, while traveling is a bizarre experience. It is a mixture of privacy and paranoia that you do not get from any other experience. Primarily, you are absolute in your privacy. You are by yourself, more isolated than even in your own home. While a home might have the comfort of familiarity, that familiarity also creates a sort of companion presence that keeps you from true isolation. Your neighbors, the familiarity of sights, the rhythm of your daily routine, etc. These forces all act as a sort of psychological companionship that allow yourself to feel a part of a larger social organism, even if you live alone. A hotel room, when traveling alone, offers none of these things. Your neighbors are strangers, the sights are foreign, your routine is upended. The complete absence from outside grounding is perhaps the most absolute form of psychological isolation possible. The hotel room, then, is perhaps, as a physical object, the strongest possible representation of the existence of living within one's own mind. A particularly strong element of this comes early in the novel, during what, for the lack of a better word, I will call "the porno scene". In this part, the protagonist, despite interest, turns down a man for sex early in the evening and retires to her room. While in her room, she decides to watch pornography, which is playing on the television. She falls asleep, and awakes in the morning to discover that she has left the pornography on all night. After turning it off, she discovers, to her embarrassment, that what she watched was likely heard by nearly everyone nearby. Hotel Rooms are an invitation to the Id. The concentration of exhaustion, isolation, and impermanence are often fertile grounds for letting us enjoy our less appropriate indulgences. The lack of tangible consequence lets us act out on the constant voices for self-gratification that exist in our heads. Of course, many of those same urges are enacted upon at the home, but they are only a part of the myriad of experiences. While at my apartment I might watch pornography naked while drinking straight from a whiskey bottle, it seems less of a total action than if I were to do it in a hotel room, because my apartment contains all the experiences of my life. The place that held my night of hedonism also held a night where I had a nice dinner party with my friends. However, a hotel room is only the place where hedonism occurred. And so, the hotel room, as evoked in this scene, represents the nature of living in one's own mind. We are, essentially, private in our thoughts, but that privacy brings with it the terror that our most private behaviors might be exposed. The base and animal parts of ourselves are always in our mind, and we do are best to hide those parts from those around us. However, those parts are most easily acquiesced to in the total isolation of the Hotel room. Thus, the hotel room also opens us to our greatest fear, that absolute strangers might be made away of us at our most base, and that in our greatest place of privacy, we are most prone to exposure.
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Sep 13, 2020 03:12
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i enjoyed this a great deal, but need a day or two to let it sit i think
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Sep 15, 2020 04:25
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oh man, the goodreads people are mad about this one, i guess because it is very clearly and concisely written compared to a girl is a half-formed thing? loving rubes
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Sep 15, 2020 05:14
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Just finished this and wanted to get down some initial thoughts. I think that both the upfront narrative of love affairs in strange hotels and the characters internal narrative have a sort of distanced intimacy. Not only is she travelling far from home for these affairs, but throughout the book she seems to be distancing herself from some knowledge or memory, sometimes very directly and at other times through digressions and distractions. We learn about her only little bits at a time, and she fights against those memories. I think the style mirrors and reinforces the feeling of distanced intimacy. We are close enough to her personal thoughts not to need a name, but far enough that we aren't considered "I".Until the Imagined Rooms section when there suddenly is an I, and we learn a lot more about her, about what's driving her. The distanced intimacy collapses, both for the reader and for the character. Stylistically the reader feels much closer to the character, and the character finally confronts those memories that she has been trying to keep at a distance. The prose in general was great. There was a lot of playful sections, like the porn paragraph, or "A plan without a B." I also liked this sequence which took place over a few pages: quote:I can see the dejection in the angle of his shoulders. I would really rather not see but the grey streetlight he loiters under refuses to become my accomplice in this. He is the one with whom it forms an alliance, arranging itself in such a fashion as to ensure I see every twinge. McBride works this one streetlamp in several times over the last few pages, as the character confronts and comes to terms with her memories. And it's great.
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Sep 16, 2020 20:14
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suggestions for next month?
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Sep 23, 2020 02:51
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Tree Goat posted:oh man, the goodreads people are mad about this one, i guess because it is very clearly and concisely written compared to a girl is a half-formed thing? This was the first book by McBride I've read, and I was really impressed by the writing--McBride clearly has a deep love of language and it varies when it needs to, is sometimes pyrotechnical, but I don't think it ever fell in the trap of being virtuosic for virtuosity's sake. So I'm a bit surprised by how many people missed the quality that was clearly there.
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Sep 23, 2020 16:06
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Health Services posted:This was the first book by McBride I've read, and I was really impressed by the writing--McBride clearly has a deep love of language and it varies when it needs to, is sometimes pyrotechnical, but I don't think it ever fell in the trap of being virtuosic for virtuosity's sake. So I'm a bit surprised by how many people missed the quality that was clearly there. a girl is a half-formed thing is probably the one of mcbride's that got the most international recognition and it's written in a very different and more obviously "experimental" way (although i am hesitant to use that word here, since it's not really apt). i enjoy strange hotel's narrator much more to be honest, but i could see somehow wanting mcbride to "top herself" or w/e and therefore being disappointed in strange hotel. i just think those people are wrong. here's the first chapter: https://www.flare.com/celebrity/must-read-the-first-chapter-of-a-girl-is-a-half-formed-thing/
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Sep 23, 2020 16:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:suggestions for next month? Out of the Silent Planet or Til We have Faces? e: I'd really like to recommend Perelandra, just on the strength of the conversation between Ransom and Weston's ghost, but the second book of the trilogy probably isn't a good place to start.
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Sep 23, 2020 23:33
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I tried reading this, but right now I'm not in a position to appreciate a book about loneliness, especially loneliness when you aren't actually alone. Still, I agree that the prose is excellent and the inner voice of the woman is very well rendered.
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Sep 24, 2020 02:31
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Jack B Nimble posted:the prose is excellent and the inner voice of the woman is very well rendered. Next month suggestion - any interest in The Orphan Master’s Son? It’s gotten some strong recommendations from a few people I know and I’m thinking about giving it a spin. An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master's Son follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.
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Sep 27, 2020 06:27
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Enjoyed this quite a bit - the language is a world away from her other works, but it works very well at maintaining the overwhelming evasiveness that is at the heart of the book. The inner dialogue is full of these little garden path sentences and there's a great line not long after the shift to first-person where she says her use of language "serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence." Mel's effortpost hits on a lot of my feelings about it - hotels are such a bizarre place that feel completely dislocated from the rest of the world, and the book leans into that. It does such a good job of boxing you into these hotel rooms that I honestly kept feeling almost like I was reading a stage play - it feels like there's some Beckett in the book's DNA for sure. The bit where she slips after getting invited to breakfast was rendered so well - just a very real and sad look at the sort of thought process someone who is still processing (well, not processing, I guess) grief and loss goes through. Not what I expecting from McBride but the fact that her writing is so effective even in a totally different mode speaks to her skill.
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Oct 1, 2020 01:59
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Grizzled Patriarch posted:hotels are such a bizarre place that feel completely dislocated from the rest of the world I think that's what I was getting at in my post, it's not disconnected at all. That at the start you feel suspicious of the woman. That there's one stark reason she's hiding, or something impossible-to-hide that is hidden, but as you come around to the story you realise she is just a woman escaping, or being as real as she can be—in a way that isn't escaping at all. It's not a dislocation, it's a matter of reality. The hotel rooms, as a matter of psychological representation—through novel storytelling or not—aren't more or less a part figurative, or not, than any other part of her. They're not hiding anything, she's not hiding anything, it's not a black box theatre for the psychological drama to play out, it is, so much, fully who she is (given we get hints at her wider life.) I thought there was something hidden, when I read the first two chapters. That, even if it wasn't the point of the novel, there would be something revealed as key to why the novel is as it is like—why she is as she is represented. That's not the point of the storytelling. The story begins at the very start, through the years and hotel rooms, through love, and not-love, culminating in a triumphant story-ending, where we do get some resolution, but life happened—through luminescent prose—the whole way. She wasn't any more or less, and there are certainly secrets hidden—hinted at—but it doesn't make "this" woman's story more or less. It's a beautiful story in absence, and masterfully told in that a resolution is given that doesn't undermine the 85% of storytelling that went before it, but solves it for a "story" ending, without betraying the prosaic meaning of a life.
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Oct 1, 2020 02:56
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i would like to thank this thread for not writing a sentence with some flavor of the phrase "hotel rooms as liminal spaces" in it despite all of us dearly wanting to
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Oct 1, 2020 16:45
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Yeah, I think I had that exact phrase in a draft before thinking better and deleting it.
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Oct 1, 2020 20:22
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hotel rooms as liminal states by zack "geist editor" parsons
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Oct 1, 2020 21:03
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going to start nominating that book every month
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Oct 1, 2020 21:08
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going to bump this BotM discussion to say this was a really great book and thanks Secret Santa for getting it for me to read, was excellent
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Mar 14, 2022 02:31
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