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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 me. Past Books of the Month [for BOTM before 2014, refer to archives] 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 June: Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood (Hiatus) August: Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Between the World and Me September: Wilkie Collins -- The Moonstone October:Seth Dickinson -- The Traitor Baru Cormorant November:Svetlana Alexievich -- Voices from Chernobyl December: Michael Chabon -- Gentlemen of the Road 2016: January: Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome February:The March Up Country (The Anabasis) of Xenophon March: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco April: Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling May: Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima June:The Vegetarian by Han Kang July:Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees August: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov September:Siddhartha by Herman Hesse October:Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse November:Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain December: It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis 2017: January: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut February: The Plague by Albert Camus March: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin April: The Conference of the Birds (مقامات الطیور) by Farid ud-Din Attar May: I, Claudius by Robert Graves  Current: Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BPDN33W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 About the book: quote:Kurlansky's dizzying new book, ''Salt: A World History,'' has countless such revelations. This is indeed a world history of salt. But it is also a history of the world as seen through those white crystals. To an almost absurd extent, he finds the salt connection nearly everywhere. The Erie Canal? Built for the sake of salt, which needed to be moved from the upstate Onondaga region to New York City. The West Indian slave trade? Underwritten by sales of salt, even more than by molasses and rum, as most history books have it. The tangled network of roads across North America? Credit the trails animals plodded as they searched for salt licks. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/books/nacl.html quote:When a publishing company agrees to produce an author's first book, it will often try to stake a claim to his or her second by writing a "first refusal" clause into the contract. This requires an author to submit any subsequent book proposal to the original publisher before hawking it elsewhere. The traditional way out of these handcuffs is to write such a dire and tedious tender for book two that no self-respecting commissioning editor will touch the project with a barge-pole. Once a rejection has been secured, one is free to write a proper proposal for a different publisher. I once asked a literary agent what would constitute a suitably boring topic. "Oh, I don't know," she said, staring at the ceiling for a moment. "How about the history of salt?" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/16/historybooks.highereducation About the Author quote:Mark Kurlansky (December 7, 1948) is an American journalist and writer of general interest non-fiction. He has written a number of books of fiction and non-fiction. His 1997 book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, (1997) was an international bestseller and was translated into more than 15 languages. His book Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea (2006) was the non-fiction winner of the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Pacing Just read, then Post. Please bookmark the thread to encourage discussion. References and Further Reading You will never need to read another book about salt after this one. Final Note: Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book!
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Jun 6, 2017 03:43
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| # ¿ May 1, 2024 04:41 |
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Seriously, this book is way better than it has any right to be. The first time I picked it up, I stayed up all night reading it.
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Jun 6, 2017 03:46
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Oh wow LOOK AT THAT ITS ON SALE on Amazon kindle for TWO dollars
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Jun 6, 2017 14:02
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StrixNebulosa posted:My library has this book! That's cool, just get your mom to join SA and post Nothing bad will happen Promise
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Jun 11, 2017 05:00
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USMC_Karl posted:
 I think there are basically two strategies: the first is to google every word and placename you don't know, and the second is just to roll on forward past it and figure if it's that important you'll figure it out as you go or catch it on a re-read. I don't think either approach is wrong, it's just a matter of personal taste. Sometimes it's more enjoyable to nail down every detail, sometimes it's more fun to just let the book carry you along past.
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Jun 12, 2017 03:47
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No guilt! No shame! read as thou wilt is the whole of the law
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Jun 12, 2017 04:01
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Guy A. Person posted:I bought this cause you pointed out it was $2 and read it and it is really good! I will never steer you wrong
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Jun 17, 2017 16:08
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Safety Biscuits posted:I enjoyed this but it shows that when all you have is a salty hammer, everything looks like a salty nail. Moreover some of the history is really wrong -- I'm in a bit of discussion on page one of the history book thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3458502 and while it looks like that was fixed, I can't really trust a guy who makes errors so blatant. AS far as I have been able to figure out, Kurlansky basically started the genre, yeah. Most of his other work seems to be historical food writing -- I really enjoyed his "Food of a Younger Land," which was one step away from a cookbook. I've noticed some errors too, though I'm also re-reading my old paper copy. For example, he talks about Marco Polo not discussing paper money, but my copy of the Travels of Marco Polo (Edited Manuel Komroff; wood block illustrations by Witold Gordon), repeatedly mentions paper money. To be fair, I usually find at least one error in just about every historical book I read -- I even found one in Edmund Morris' Theodore Roosevelt trilogy (he describes Theodore's mother as enjoying Uncle Remus stories several decades before they were published). That said I don't see it so much as "hammer -> nail" as it is using history of [thing] as a lens through which to view the history of other things. Focusing on a specific economic good and viewing history through that good gives a different picture than viewing history through, say, battles, or religion. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Jun 18, 2017 |
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Jun 17, 2017 18:50
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alnilam posted:My copy of the book gets in this week, so I might be reading it somewhat into July. Am I going to get in trouble for reading the book off-month? Only the cool kind of trouble chicks dig rebels
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Jun 19, 2017 04:24
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Groke posted:Finished, was a good and cool read. Now I've got a craving for dried and salted cod and I'm also pretty sure I'll be putting the author's earlier book Cod on my to-read list. Kurlansky also wrote a similar history of cod, titled "Cod: a Biography of the Fish that Changed the World." Dude has an oevure.
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Jun 19, 2017 17:32
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Need next month's suggestions.
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Jun 21, 2017 20:31
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CestMoi posted:Babyfucker by Urs Allemann Don't we already have a whole thread about not reading that?
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Jun 22, 2017 03:50
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| # ¿ May 1, 2024 04:41 |
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so everyone is agreed that, in honor of the death of noted author Michael Bond, next months' BotM will be "A Bear Called Paddington" we're all cool with that right
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Jun 29, 2017 00:34
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