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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 June: Howard Zinn -- A People's History of the United States July: Mary Renault -- The Last of the Wine August: Barbara Tuchtman -- The Guns of August September: Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice October: Roger Zelazny -- A Night in the Lonesome October November: John Gardner -- Grendel December: Christopher Moore -- The Stupidest Angel 2015: January: Italo Calvino -- Invisible Cities February: Karl Ove Knausgaard -- My Struggle: Book 1. March: Knut Hamsun -- Hunger April: Liu Cixin -- 三体 ( The Three-Body Problem) May: John Steinbeck -- Cannery Row [url=http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3723739&pagenumber=1&perpage=40#post446887688]June: Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood (Hiatus) August: Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Between the World and Me Current: Wilkie Collins -- The Moonstone Free on Kindle:http://www.amazon.com/The-Moonstone-Wilkie-Collins-ebook/dp/B0084AYI92 (also free on Project Gutenberg) quote:T. S. Eliot described The Moonstone as "the first and greatest of English detective novels". It is certainly a landmark in the history of crime fiction and has a strong claim to having established detective fiction as a genre. It influenced Collins's successors from Trollope and Conan Doyle onwards and has set the standard by which other detective novels are judged. During its serialisation in All the Year Round there were crowds of anxious readers outside the publishers' offices in Wellington Street waiting for the next instalment. Like The Woman in White, it has never been out of print. http://www.wilkie-collins.info/wilkie_collins_biography.htm I think people will like this one. It's probably the first "modern" detective novel, and it really is surprisingly modern in a lot of ways, not just in terms of tone but also in terms of technical tricks like multiple narrators, from different backgrounds, all writing from their individual and distinct point of view. There's also a lot of social commentary implicit in the text, some of it surprisingly modern in its viewpoint. (On the other hand, some of it doesn't come off so well from a modern viewpoint, either). More importantly though it's just a hell of a story. Parts may seem a little hackneyed but remember he's inventing the tropes. corn in the bible posted:I was in Italy once, in this little backwater town out in the middle of nowhere, and the bookstore had exactly one book in English, which was Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. About the Author quote:He lived an unconventional, Bohemian lifestyle, loved good food and wine to excess, wore flamboyant clothes, travelled abroad frequently, formed long-term relationships with two women but married neither, and took vast quantities of opium over many years to relieve the symptoms of ill health. Collins's circle of friends included many pre-eminent figures of the day. He knew the major writers, particularly Charles Dickens with whom he regularly collaborated, as well as a host of minor novelists. His friends and acquaintances included some of the foremost artists, playwrights, theatrical personalities, musicians, publishers, physicians and society figures of the time. Collins's unorthodox lifestyle reveals a cynical regard for the Victorian establishment. This view is reflected in his books together with a sense of humour and a profound understanding for many of the then prevailing social injustices. http://www.wilkie-collins.info/wilkie_collins_biography.htm Discussion, Questions & Themes: quote:After The Moonstone, Collins's novels contained fewer thriller elements and more social commentary. The subject matter continued to be sensational, but his popularity declined. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne commented: "What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? / Some demon whispered—'Wilkie! have a mission."[22] Pacing Let's try to keep spoilers out of the thread until September 15th at least. References and Further Reading Wilkie is the narrator of Dan Simmon's novel Drood. 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! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Sep 5, 2015 |
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Sep 4, 2015 03:50
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:I must admit that I was really into the first part of the novel while I was travelling. Then I had a break and when I got back to book I started the second section and I never adjusted properly. So, confession: I never finished it. Did anyone else find that transition difficult? I think he does such a good job with the first narrator that the shift to the second one takes a little to get used to. It's worth making the attempt to dive back in though. Anyway, found this: quote:One of the features that made The Moonstone such a success was the sensationalist depiction of opium addiction. Unbeknownst to his readership, Collins was writing from personal experience. In his later years, Collins grew severely addicted to laudanum and as a result suffered from paranoid delusions, the most notable being his conviction that he was constantly accompanied by a doppelganger he dubbed "Ghost Wilkie".
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Sep 4, 2015 22:49
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quote:Collins quickly fell into Dickens’s orbit. . . . . It is tempting to see the strangely bonded doppelgängers who populate Collins’s fiction as reflecting something of his own relationship with Dickens. Collins became Dickens’s most trusted friend, a frequent house guest and travelling companion. Dickens found Collins’s aura of louche bohemianism liberating. His letters to Collins often contain sly sexual innuendo, and the pair went on midnight tours of the disreputable corners of London and Paris. In 1857, while acting in a play by Collins, Dickens fell in love with the young actress Ellen Ternan, who became his lover. Soon, he was proposing that he and Collins collaborate on “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices” (recently reprinted by Hesperus; $13.95)—a humorous account of a walking tour through Cumberland, whose itinerary provided cover for Dickens as he trailed Ternan. quote:Still, in his own fashion, Collins did manage to get to the top of the mountain. The fact that his work could be imitated says something about its fidelity to a strain of human experience, and about his method of describing that experience, which is plainspoken and radically inclusive. In the same way that everyone in Collins’s stories becomes his own detective—spying, dressing up, intercepting mail—so everyone also becomes his own explainer. Nannies, servants, gentlemen, ladies, the wronged, the robbed, and the guilty all contribute to Collins’s narrative. This makes the books feel, for all the old contrivances of plot, a mirror of contemporary reality. Collins anticipated an age in which everyone is a writer. (Source article contains Moonstone spoilers so I'll post the link later). Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Sep 5, 2015 |
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Sep 5, 2015 19:57
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Let's try to keep spoilers out of the thread until September 15th at least.
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Sep 5, 2015 22:43
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Nobody has anything else to say? =( Also, we need suggestions for next month.
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Sep 15, 2015 21:13
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Mel Mudkiper posted:
That and a book that people want to read. Can y'all talk up your suggestions a bit?
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Sep 17, 2015 08:06
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Any last minute suggestions for the poll for next month before I scrounge together something from the recent posts in the Recommendations thread?
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Sep 26, 2015 03:18
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xcheopis posted:Something by Robertson Davies. Ok, but he's been suggested before and included in polls and nobody bit. Which book and why should people read it?
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Sep 26, 2015 04:04
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xcheopis posted:A bit of good ol' English "but he looks weird, you guys!". Oh, and this is my comment: The real question I have about the book is the extent to which Collins was deliberately painting the Indian characters as heroes. To a modern reader they come across that way; they certainly seem to win in the end; but I'm not sure what message Wilkie was trying to send. Was he defending "natives" ? Implicitly critiquing colonialism? Just writing a good story that played on the doubts as to the validity of their colonial enterprise that even the most British Britisher must have, on some level, had? I don't know!
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Sep 26, 2015 08:35
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alternate plan: maybe we just make The Traitor Baru Cormorant next months' book since it's a Book Barn author and it's getting good reviews and so forth? edit: hrm nah I need to do the poll don't I Ok poll will go up later tonight
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Sep 28, 2015 22:35
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