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Welcome earthlings 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 2011: January: John Keats, Endymion Febuary/March: Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote April: Laurell K. Hamilton, Obsidian Butterfly May: Richard A. Knaak - Diablo #1: Legacy of Blood June: Pamela Britton - On The Move July: Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep August: Louis L'Amour - Bendigo Shafter September: Ian Fleming - Moonraker October: Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes November: John Ringo - Ghost December: James Branch Cabell - Jurgen 2012: January: G.K. Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday Febuary: M. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage March: Joseph Heller - Catch-22 April: Zack Parsons - Liminal States May: Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood June: James Joyce - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man July: William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch August: William Faulkner - The Sound & The Fury September/October: Leo Tolstoy - War & Peace November: David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas December: Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night 2013 January: Walter M. Miller - A Canticle for Liebowitz Febuary: Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination March: Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains Of The Day April: Don Delillo - White Noise May: Anton LeVey - The Satanic Bible June/July: Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell August: Michael Swanwick - Stations of the Tide September: John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids October: Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House November: Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory December: Roderick Thorp - Nothing Lasts Forever 2014: January: Ursula K. LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness February: Mikhail Bulgalov - Master & Margarita March: Richard P. Feynman -- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! April: James Joyce -- Dubliners May: Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- 100 Years of Solitude Current: A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn The entire text is available online for free right here with Zinn's permission. 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, César Chávez), 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] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People's_History_of_the_United_States About the Author Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010) was an American historian, author, playwright, and social activist. He was a political science professor at Boston University for 24 years and taught history at Spelman College for 7 years. Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States.[2] He wrote extensively about the civil rights and anti-war movements, and labor history of the United States. His memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work.[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn Discussion: This thread is for general discussion of anything you think of while reading this book. Whether you liked it or hated the book, whether you liked or hated the author personally, other books it reminds you of, that thing your dad did that one time, how Foucault's theory of discourse provides a useful lens to discuss gender relationships in the text, farts, whatever. The biggest problem we've had with the Book of the Month has been lack of participation, so just saying something that demonstrates you've actually read a page or two shows people that everyone else is doing it and encourages the next guy to jump into our nice warm lake as well. Questions & Themes: How different is this from the history you read in school growing up? From your current perceptions? Is that answer different for people who went to school in 80's or 90's and for people born in more recent decades? This book is deliberately slanted to give a particular historical perespective; is that a bad thing? Is it necessary? Is it oversimplified? Is Howard Zinn just a crazed Marxist with an axe to grind? Final Note: If you have any suggestions to change, improve or assess the book club generally, please PM or email me -- i.e., keep it out of this thread -- at least until into the last five days of the month, just so we don't derail discussion of the current book with meta-discussion. I do want to hear new ideas though, seriously, so please do actually PM or email me or whatever, or if you can't do either of those things, just hold that thought till the last five days of the month before posting it in this thread. Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book!
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May 30, 2014 04:15
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 21:57 |
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Apparently people aren't Zinn fans around here after all :P Anyway, it's time for nominations for next month's book. Throw me suggestions and I'll put together the poll in a few days.
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Jun 20, 2014 13:56
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Any remaining suggestions? Poll setup got a little delayed by the Great Downtime. I may trawl through the most recent "real literature" thread for some more suggestions. Capital in the Twenty First Century is probably out just because it's so big and so technical and I think also somewhat back-ordered. Plus, there is a good running thread on in it in D&D already: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3625993
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Jun 26, 2014 19:05
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Furious Lobster posted:Cheers! Thanks for the thread link, it's exactly what I was looking for. IIRC it's out for the kindle if people have that option. Do you mean Knut Hamsen? Hunger would probably be a decent pick but I'm a little worried about making it an Official Book Barn Pick due to the whole "author was literally a huge hitler fan" thing. I really like the idea of picking a female author, but Deathless looks like it's fantasy -- is it? I'll probably add it to my personal list regardless, just to see how it compares to Jurgen.
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Jun 26, 2014 20:47
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