Book Barn BOTM POLL: you MAY choooooose!

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Book Barn BOTM POLL: you MAY choooooose!

Are you a bad enough dude to read a book? This poll is closed.
Warlock by Oakley Hall	5	16.67%
Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Murakami	3	10.00%
Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance by Pirsig	3	10.00%
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis	4	13.33%
I, Claudius by Robert Graves	15	50.00%
Total:	21 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

You can vote for one, or more than one, or even all of them! But if you vote, and the book you vote for is chosen, please participate in the discussion. Thanks!

Warlock by Oakley Hall

quote:

Warlock is a western novel by American author Oakley Hall, first published in 1958. The story is set in the early 1880s, in a fictional southwestern mining town called Warlock and its vicinity. The novel's characters and many elements of its plot are loosely based on actual people and events from Tombstone, Arizona during the same time period, including Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.[1]

Hall's most famous novel, Warlock was a finalist for the 1958 Pulitzer Prize, and has since been hailed as a classic of American West literature.[2][3][4] Writers Thomas Pynchon and Richard Fari�a were especially fond of the novel, even dedicating what Pynchon called a "micro-cult" to it while students at Cornell University.[2] Pynchon praised it for restoring "to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity", and for showing "that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels."[5]

Hall's subsequent novels The Bad Lands (1978) and Apaches (1986) are sequels to Warlock, though they do not portray the same principal characters or setting. The three novels together form the Legends West trilogy.

In 1959, Warlock was adapted into a film of the same name starring Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Anthony Quinn.

Franchescanado posted:

Warlock is an classic western that inspired a lot of American Post-Modern writers, (including Farina, Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy etc.) that takes many genre conventions of westerns and fulfills them while also turning them on their head. It's basically "The greatest western that no one has read".

2) Popular Hits of the Showa Era

quote:

Murakami, the aging enfant terrible of Japanese letters, built his reputation on gleefully shocking novels, peopled by sexual deviants and murderous psychopaths. His latest work to be published in English concerns a quintet of torpid young men who share a taste for karaoke, rock-paper-scissors, and �droolingly mindless� laughter. On a whim, one of them cuts the throat of a woman he bumps into on the street; her friends�a sextet of stodgy divorc�es in their late thirties�decide to take revenge. As the violence escalates (a rocket launcher and an atomic bomb come into play), both groups experience, for the first time, friendship and a sense of purpose. The satire is broad, but Murakami is mercilessly funny as he tracks his characters� evolution from twits to scholars of guerrilla warfare. ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/07/popular-hits-of-the-showa-era

quote:

It's a set-up like a video game: two rival gangs fight to death for the control of a Tokyo district. In one gang, six young losers committed only to drinking, voyeurism and karaoke singing, in the other six tough independent older women. From ambush to revenge, both groups are gradually decimated until the ultimate showdown.
In Murakami's inimitably brutal and brilliant style, Popular Hits dissects the gender and generational conflicts of contemporary society in a hilarious satire.

Murakami is mercilessly funny as he tracks his characters' evolution from twits to scholars of guerrilla warfare'
New Yorker

'One of the funniest and strangest gang wars in recent literature'
Booklist

http://www.pushkinpress.com/book/popular-hits-of-the-showa-era/

3) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

quote:

[
According to Edward Abbey, the book is Pirsig's fictionalized autobiography[1] of a 17-day journey he made on a motorcycle from Minnesota to Northern California along with his son Chris. The story of this journey is recounted in a first-person narrative, although the author is not identified. Father and son are also accompanied, for the first nine days of the trip, by close friends John and Sylvia Sutherland, with whom they part ways in Montana. The trip is punctuated by numerous philosophical discussions, referred to as Chautauquas by the author, on topics including epistemology, ethical emotivism and the philosophy of science.

Many of these discussions are tied together by the story of the narrator's own past self, who is referred to in the third person as Phaedrus (after Plato's dialogue). Phaedrus, a teacher of creative and technical writing at a small college, became engrossed in the question of what defines good writing, and what in general defines good, or "Quality". His philosophical investigations eventually drove him insane, and he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, which permanently changed his personality.

Towards the end of the book, Phaedrus's personality begins to re-emerge and the narrator is reconciled with his past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance

4) Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis,

quote:

I'd heard of Zorba the Greek, in the way that the classics of modern literature totter into the subconscious even without being read or studied. It was only while holidaying in Greece in summer 2010 that I bought a tatty, overpriced Faber edition from a small bookshop in Athens as I waited for the boat to Heraklion, the main port of Crete where Nikos Kazantzakis, the book's author, was born and is buried.

The novel tells the story of the narrator's friendship with a lively 60ish-year-old lover, fighter, adventurer, musician, chef, miner, storyteller, dancer ... the occupations are endless. This is Zorba, described by the narrator as "the man I had sought so long in vain". They spend a year on Crete together, Zorba managing the lignite mine that the narrator is financing as a project to bring him into closer contact with working-class men, whose honest, simple lifestyles the narrator admires but cannot emulate. It is a tale of Zorba's seductions, most memorably of Madame Hortense, the heavily made-up, big-buttocked, ageing courtesan who offers the two men hospitality and a little more, and of the narrator's melancholy "life-and-death struggle" to write an account of his Buddha while waiting for Zorba to return from the mine and make his supper.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/aug/14/zorba-greek-nikos-kazantzakis-summer-readings

5) I, Claudius by Robert Graves

quote:

I, Claudius (1934) is a novel by English writer Robert Graves, written in the form of an autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius. Accordingly, it includes the history of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and the Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC to Caligula's assassination in 41 AD.

The 'autobiography' of Claudius continues (from Claudius' accession after Caligula's death, to his own death in 54) in Claudius the God (1935). The sequel also includes a section written as a biography of Herod Agrippa, contemporary of Claudius and future King of the Jews. The two books were adapted by the BBC into an award-winning television serial, I, Claudius.

In 1998 the Modern Library ranked I, Claudius fourteenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present.[2]

Three days to vote from . . . mark!

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Apr 30, 2017

# ? Apr 30, 2017 16:01

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 5, 2024 04:35

chernobyl kinsman: Mar 18, 2007; a friend of the friendly atom; Soiled Meat

please vote for i claudius

# ? Apr 30, 2017 20:45

Groke: Jul 27, 2007; New Adventures In Mom Strength

I'm a long-standing dilettante in Roman matters (to the point of once studying a whole year's worth of Latin for fun), and what do you know, I haven't actually read Graves yet.

# ? May 3, 2017 11:58

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

Graves gets the poliice verso. I'll get the thread up in a bit, probably this weekend.

# ? May 5, 2017 05:00

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

I have been a Bad Mod but I'll get the thread up tonight

# ? May 8, 2017 18:23

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Book Barn BOTM POLL: you MAY choooooose!