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DISCORD LINK: https://discord.gg/hDKr5re Hello friends, and welcome to the CSPAM book club thread I noticed after a whole bunch of drunken derails that there may be some interest in this. Also I enjoy book clubs that aren't a bunch of bored old women and are instead a bunch of anime obsessed neckbeard socialists. So here we are. Books! Some books are good books! Everybody loves them.  Some books are bad books and only people who want to feel smart love them, but that's okay because they hate themselves and they need something to love!  What I am thinking the structure of it will be like Maoist Third World. I will be the chairman but I will crowdsource pretty much everything. Here is how it will happen: 1) Anybody who wants to make a suggestion must post it here and give a good explanation as to why we should all read it. You can also give a bad explanation but I do not recommend doing that! 2) Once we get a bunch I will post a strawpoll or something. Everybody gets one vote, nobody can vote for their own. Honor system, be honorable! 3) Once a book is decided we will pick a reasonable length of time to wait until we deliberate again on it. People are free to chat about the book in the thread of course, but be mindful of spoilers! Some people aren't basement dwelling troglodytes with unlimited free time and thus it takes them awhile to read a book! 4) Then we meet and discuss it and it will be ever so much fun! Some suggestions for picking a book: 1) Maybe 500 pages at most. Most people are going to be unsure about your selection and may balk at committing to a 30,000 page book about dragons molesting people 2) Like 90% of the suggestions are going to be sci-fi or young adult. Pick something different if you have something in mind! 3) Don't feel hedged in by a theme. Don't exclude books of short stories or graphic novels just because a bunch of stick in rear end nerds don't consider them "proper" or whatever. I'm drinking MTN DEW out of a 2 liter and eating pizza that's been in my car all day. I have no standards and ain't one of you motherfuckers is better than me. 4) Pick something you genuinely enjoy (if it's a book you've read), or something that genuinely interests you! It will make pitching it a lot easier and people believe they will enjoy what they can see other people enjoy! That's the gist of it, hope I didn't forget anything! For the next few days I will be collecting recommendations of books and suggestions for the structure and then I will make a Chairman's Statement Prefacing Authorial Matters and we will be off. Gimme some recommendation CSPAMMERS! p.s if anybody wants to make fun graphics I'll put them in the OP!   ***FIRST ROUND OF VOTING IS UP***UP FOR 24 HOURS, TOP FIVE RUNOFF IF NOTHING GETS 50% WHICH THEY PROBABLY WON'T LIST OF BOOKS WITH DESCRIPTIONS HERE: https://pastebin.com/WdG34pGi VOTE HERE: http://www.strawpoll.me/12770539 THE RULES: 1) Vote for up to 5 you'd like to read 2) You cannot vote for your own. Honor system, DON'T gently caress THIS UP OR I'LL JUST GO DICTATOR FINAL ROUND OF BOOK CLUB VOTING HAS BEGUNPOLL: http://www.strawpoll.me/12775981 JUST PICK ONE THIS TIME, whatever ends up on top wins, percentage be damned because I'm not going to bother with a dozen rounds of this to get to 50%  PHASE 3: THE READENING The book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation is available in a variety of places, including under the pinned posts in the Discord. I suggest you buy it if you can afford, to support authors. It's a bit over 300 pages, and if there's no objections, I'm going to say we will meet on May 10th, at 9pm EST to discuss it formally, which gives us 2 weeks. If anybody feels you will need longer please let it be known, this date is flexible. I do want the thread itself to be a discussion place, and I want it to be throughout the 2 week reading period. In short, the formal rule here is DISCUSS FREELY IN THE FORUM, BUT USE SPOILER TAGS LIBERALLY I'd say keep it to the thread rather than the Discord because more people actually use and check this, so it will be a better place to share impressions and thoughts. Any objections? let them be known now Epic High Five has issued a correction as of 00:38 on Apr 27, 2017 |
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Apr 15, 2017 22:20
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 04:58 |
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I've heard All Quiet is a fantastic and horribly depressing books and I love horribly depressing things. Deffo a good recc
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Apr 15, 2017 23:46
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baw posted:everyone following politics now should read Timothy Crouse's Boys on the Bus since everyone has already read Nixon Agonistes You're certainly welcome to pitch it formally so it can be voted on
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Apr 16, 2017 00:32
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Chokes McGee posted:Nothing book matters  Noted, tho I recommend you pitch it if you expect votes
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Apr 16, 2017 00:39
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baw posted:but if we're doing fiction i will recommend Alaa Al Asany's The Yacoubian Building follows characters living in a once-wealthy apartment complex in modern Cairo and shows how intersecting economic, social and institutional oppressions profoundly affects their lives added just to clarify it's open season - recommend whatever I explicitly do not want a politics-themed book club because everybody would stop participating after a week
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Apr 16, 2017 00:41
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Actually hell, that's going to be my recommendation Nothing Matters, by Robin Nadler why? quote:Dr. Jack Stephens didn’t care. Nothing mattered to him. He didn’t care about feelings. He didn’t care about love. If it wasn’t on the operating table, he never cared about the heart. For a world-class cardiac surgeon, he was as closed off to love as they come, the living definition of irony. It wasn’t until he took a minute for himself on the hospital roof and saw a woman standing on the ledge that he realized once and for all that just maybe, something did matter.
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Apr 16, 2017 00:42
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C-Euro posted:Cool thread, don't know if I'll participate because I resolved to read more of my own book collection this year but if I see something I recognize I'll drop in. 
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Apr 16, 2017 01:14
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eonwe posted:Since Candide is obviously free, I'm going to start on it now Ya same
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Apr 16, 2017 01:15
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baw posted:hasn't everyone already read Candide I'm not college educated so no Everybody I know who has read it has done so for a college course
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Apr 16, 2017 01:20
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2nd one added, no vaporwave tho let's see if "for the tankies" gets votes!
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Apr 16, 2017 01:31
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cda posted:Tenth of December by George Saunders. Why this book? Because it's short stories so even if you don't read the whole book, you can still talk about it. Also, the stories are really loving good. Best ones: Semplica Girl Diaries, Escape from Spiderhead, Puppy, The Tenth of December. But they're all really really worth reading. On this note, my serious suggestion will be Birthday of the World by Ursula K LeGuin She's always been one of the gods of my authorial pantheon because I feel like nobody strikes to the core of what speculative fiction is supposed to be. This is a collection of short stories, each of which stand on their own and are quite wonderful. The centerpiece, and if you read only one read this one, is The Matter of Seggri, which I predict that most people will find deeply troubling in how thoroughly and plausibly it shows how horrifically the tables can be turned without anybody realizing that that has even happened. For dudes who have lived a comfy life it will be doubly jarring.
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Apr 16, 2017 03:58
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Consummate Professional posted:I would like to suggest Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I love this book and heartily recommend it but please make a pitch so I don't have to leave a spreadsheet cell empty
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Apr 16, 2017 06:50
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Gringostar posted:Vonnegut is good, but if we're going to read him I would suggest God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Expert tier pandering I must say. If the club weren't so decidedly communist it would be a major factor. I love that I know about the landmarks and geography and streets that Vonnegut references in his books while 99% of the rest of the country has no clue. A nice Vonnegutesque inversion of how things normally go with lavishly elaborate directions and poo poo in NYC Coolguye posted:Devil in the white city owned, good one from eonwe. If this doesn't get selected I'll probably read it on its own haha
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Apr 16, 2017 07:41
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Good poo poo so far, will probably close down recommendations tomorrow night and begin Sinister Phase 2, so spread the word in various other threads because I don't leave my own threads or the Trump thread and also I'm drunk on Madeira woooooo
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Apr 16, 2017 07:53
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Good stuff, good stuff. I'll probably start compiling stuff tonight over the last of my ethanol and get some structure going, including the rules for thread chat in between book announcement and book discussion meetupbaw posted:i never read anna karenina because the back of the book literally spoiled the ending which is why i never read the back of books anymore. or forwards Yeah I had this happen to be with We and I resolved to never read forwards or introductions, especially of older books where eggheads think it's okay to spoil poo poo because THEY'VE known about the plot for decades. Annoying as gently caress.
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Apr 16, 2017 20:45
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I hate all that soppy Victorian poo poo because I can't distance myself from the fact that their whole idle lifestyle was a direct product of the worst kind of slavery, imperialism, brutality, and massive systemic genocide that the human race has ever seen They're all villains
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Apr 17, 2017 16:56
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mormonpartyboat posted:
I prefer the Danes that didn't get drowned
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Apr 17, 2017 17:05
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So I did a test of some conversation heavy stuff - Asimov's Robots and Empire - and I read about a page a minute, which I dunno I guess is good according to this graph the page showed me. I have a trillion books I want to read though so I've been trying to increase my reading speed. There's not really any point to this, I'm just trying to break myself of the habit of subvocalizing and it's been really annoyingly hard so far and I wanted to complain
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Apr 17, 2017 17:07
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Coolguye posted:my sister took a speed-reading class a couple of years back and according to her it actually helped. apparently the majority of the material they were slated to absorb were nonfiction and technical manuals so i'm not sure how well it would translate to reading novels or biographies, but you could doubtlessly look up a bunch of the techniques online if you wanted to work with it. I've gathered from my research into "how did Teddy Roosevelt read so goddamned much despite everything else he did" that one of the big secrets to quickly reading fiction and biographies and the like is to skip the fluff. For books where you enjoy the fluff, there may be no alternatives Of course just reading a whole bunch speeds you up naturally I'd imagine so maybe that's my best bet. Next I'm going to try listening to music to kill subvocalizing because the 1-2-3-4 counting in my head method is too distracting
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Apr 17, 2017 17:16
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eonwe posted:Its funny, I assumed this would be 90% Scifi, so I purposely didn't really recommend any, and there hasn't been a whole ton of it recommended period. I was probably too firm in my admonition to not just recommend dense scifi tomes but I'm not sad. There's good stuff of all types out there and this may expose people to some new and fun things I just started Foundation last night after having read through the whole arc up through this and he never ceases to surprise me at how engaged I can become in novels that are little more than people chatting in various offices
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Apr 17, 2017 17:21
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In any case, the best SciFi is speculative fiction and we've got plenty of that
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Apr 17, 2017 17:21
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Coolguye posted:personally, listening to audiobooks was what really transformed my reading world. everyone has lots of transit time nowadays, whether it be in a car or on a bus/train, and listening to audiobooks fits perfectly into any lifestyle that has those delays. it's not like you can do anything more interesting than read a good book during your commute or your time running errands. what's your alternatives, listen to pandora for the hottest recommendations from teenyboppers or listen to NPR give the millionth "truth is in the middle" naval gaze report? please. like, my rec for the book club is 274 pages in paperback, but 11 and a half hours on audio form. i consumed the entire book, sans an appendix that is nothing more than the AIM transcript of a catfishing prank, in a week and a half just because i could listen to it when driving, when cleaning, when mowing the lawn, etc. i required no opportunistic quiet, lazy afternoons or rainy evenings where things got cancelled to get it done. it's really a hilariously straight win to simply find so much time to enrich your life with stories and language. Oh yeah, I've got hundreds of books on my Audible by now, love me some audiobooks. I generally have 2 physical books (I'm counting Kindle ones here) and 1 audiobook that I'm reading at any given time. Audiobook for dog walks and commutes, physical for everything else and 2 for variety
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Apr 17, 2017 17:35
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I technically stopped taking submissions last night but I got dragged into meetings today and couldn't get it done so everything up until now is going to be included It's gonna be a clusterfuck, I wasn't expecting all these submissions, we may need to do a runoff
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Apr 18, 2017 02:03
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mormonpartyboat posted:i presumed itd burn out before we get the first one to read so im just sharing things With enough participants we can survive a high attrition rate I just hope the first pick ends up being something not terrible that scares people away
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Apr 18, 2017 02:12
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mormonpartyboat posted:have you ever read his short story pate de foie gras? This is peak Asimov indeed and was great, read it at work b/c office jobs are lol
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Apr 18, 2017 02:14
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SHE'S UP Let's see if this system I just cooked up while champagne basted works ***FIRST ROUND OF VOTING IS UP***UP FOR 24 HOURS, TOP FIVE RUNOFF IF NOTHING GETS 50% WHICH THEY PROBABLY WON'T LIST OF BOOKS WITH DESCRIPTIONS HERE: https://pastebin.com/WdG34pGi VOTE HERE: http://www.strawpoll.me/12770539 THE RULES: 1) Vote for up to 5 you'd like to read 2) You cannot vote for your own. Honor system, DON'T gently caress THIS UP OR I'LL JUST GO DICTATOR
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Apr 18, 2017 02:26
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Fidel Castronaut posted:sorry if this has been discussed but are you planning to have people read a portion of the book and discuss, or read the whole thing and discuss? i'd vote the former personally. Plan on setting a "read by date" and enforcing a strict rule of spoiler tags in open chat in the meantime. It'll be less structured, but people have weird and differing schedules and times they can commit and I'd like open discussion as people progress to be a thing
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Apr 18, 2017 02:55
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Peel posted:did i gently caress something up or did u miss my book I think I got them all but I may have missed it. Please yell at me next round and I will put it at the top
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Apr 18, 2017 03:13
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C-Euro posted:Yo you missed my Candide post but I guess I didn't explicitly say it was a recommendation. Throw it on the pile for next round I guess, no biggie. Yeah I went with explicit ones, plus like 3 people already read it in the time between then and now
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Apr 18, 2017 03:25
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Votes so far are shaking out differently than I expected but still v good
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Apr 18, 2017 03:30
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Comin up on zero hour, vote while you can!***FIRST ROUND OF VOTING IS UP*** UP FOR 24 HOURS, TOP FIVE RUNOFF IF NOTHING GETS 50% WHICH THEY PROBABLY WON'T LIST OF BOOKS WITH DESCRIPTIONS HERE: https://pastebin.com/WdG34pGi VOTE HERE: http://www.strawpoll.me/12770539 THE RULES: 1) Vote for up to 5 you'd like to read 2) You cannot vote for your own. Honor system, DON'T gently caress THIS UP OR I'LL JUST GO DICTATOR
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Apr 18, 2017 18:16
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cda posted:Oh poo poo. I should have read this fully and I didn't and I voted for Tenth of December, which was my own. I'm sorry. It's not going to win anyway and you can just subtract one vote. It isn't going to make a difference in this case but I appreciate your honesty FINAL ROUND OF BOOK CLUB VOTING HAS BEGUNPOLL: http://www.strawpoll.me/12775981 JUST PICK ONE THIS TIME, whatever ends up on top wins, percentage be damned because I'm not going to bother with a dozen rounds of this to get to 50%
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Apr 18, 2017 21:31
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Helsing posted:Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation looks really good but the kindle edition is like $35 and the paperback is almost $50 on Amazon. I've already considered this issue and if it wins, I'll definitely refrain from trying to acquire an epub version that I would absolutely not post somewhere the grubby public could get their hands on it
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Apr 18, 2017 21:57
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Helsing posted:*votes for Everything was Forever*
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Apr 18, 2017 22:05
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Helsing posted:Also seriously people All Quiet is a classic and you should read it but it's honestly not that interesting, it's a pretty generic "war is hell" story, well written but I don't know how much interesting discussion it would generate compared to this awesome sounding book about the USSR A good argument to have made in the last few days
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Apr 18, 2017 22:07
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Fidel Castronaut posted:officially proposing after this we we pick like five or so short stories or even perhaps some long-form articles so we get more variety and people who want speculative fiction can get some and people who want 19th century naturalism can get some or whatever it is that you be wanting and desiring in ur reading pleasure If next round changes in any significant way it will probably be around a theme, one which I will exercise my role as Chairman to select I'm partial to "short story collection" as a theme but we will see My main goal is to keep things interesting and varied
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Apr 18, 2017 22:18
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I did a thing posted:So should I just go ahead and purchase the soviet book? When are you closing voting? Tomorrow morning or afternoon, it's already slowed down so it'll be whenever I get settled in at work. I wouldn't purchase it yet, a lot of the unruly alcoholic who only post at 2am have yet to vote
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Apr 18, 2017 23:25
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Reminder again for gettin' off work krew FINAL ROUND OF BOOK CLUB VOTING HAS BEGUN POLL: http://www.strawpoll.me/12775981 JUST PICK ONE THIS TIME, whatever ends up on top wins, percentage be damned because I'm not going to bother with a dozen rounds of this to get to 50%
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Apr 19, 2017 00:56
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It looks like the Soviet book will win If uh, anybody can find a source for it that isn't like $35 and could share it with the CSPAM discord (working on getting a channel made) I'd appreciate it because I would like good turnout for book #1 also ya u should all totally read Cat's Cradle and esp Mother Night
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Apr 19, 2017 04:50
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 04:58 |
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Baloogan posted:when do the polls close? whenever I wake up but your book has a comfy lead
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Apr 19, 2017 04:53
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