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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 June: Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky July: Ficcionies by Jorge Luis Borges Current: My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber  Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Hard-Times-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060933089 Many of the individual short stories are also available online if you search. I suggest starting with "The Night the Bed Fell," "The Day the Dam Broke," and "The Dog that Bit People." http://www.fadedpage.com/books/20131017/html.php#ch02 http://www.fadedpage.com/books/20131017/html.php#ch04 http://www.fadedpage.com/books/20131017/html.php#ch08 It is also available as a free ebook to those of you who live in Canada or other areas with less stringent copyright laws than the United States: https://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/thurberj-mylifeandhardtimes/thurberj-mylifeandhardtimes-00-e.html, also http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20131017 If at all possible, find a copy with Thurber's illustrations.. They're hilarious, if extraordinarily poorly drawn (Thurber was half-blind from a childhood accident).
About the book: My Life and Hard Times is the 1933 autobiography of James Thurber.[1] It is considered his greatest work as he relates in bewildered deadpan prose the eccentric goings on of his family and the town beyond (Columbus, Ohio). Characters include the maid who lives in constant fear of being hypnotised; a grandfather who believes that the American Civil War is still going on; a mother who fears electricity is leaking all over the house and Muggs, "The Dog That Bit People", an Airedale Terrier that had a penchant for biting certain people... including the author. The book was a best seller and also achieved high critical praise. Russell Baker writing in the New York Times said it was "possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever". Ogden Nash said it was "just about the best thing I ever read"', and Dorothy Parker said "Mad, I don't say. Genius I grant you." About the Author quote:James Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894 – November 2, 1961) was an American cartoonist, author, humorist, journalist, playwright, and celebrated wit. He was best known for his cartoons and short stories published mainly in The New Yorker magazine, such as "The Catbird Seat," and collected in his numerous books. He was one of the most popular humorists of his time, as he celebrated the comic frustrations and eccentricities of ordinary people. He wrote the Broadway comedy The Male Animal in collaboration with his college friend Elliott Nugent; it was later adapted into a film starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. His short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" has been adapted for film twice, once in 1947 and again in 2013. James Thurber and E.B. White (he of Charlotte's Web and The Elements of Style) were, working together, the writing engine that made the New Yorker magazine what it is today. quote:Long before James Thurber was on the cover of Time and widely known as the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain, he was a not-so-young-and-aspiring writer who shared an office “the size of a hall bedroom” with another up-and-comer named E. B. White at a fledgling comic weekly edited by Harold Ross. Ross hired Thurber in 1927 under the mistaken impression that he and White were good friends (they would become so later). Thurber arrived at The New Yorker from Columbus, Ohio, via Paris, France, and a brief stint at the New York Evening Post. Ross intended him to be the “Jesus”—someone who would organize the chaos out of which the magazine was created each week. Thurber failed as an organizational mastermind, but soon joined Ross, White, Katharine Angell, and Wolcott Gibbs as one of the most important influences on the development of The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/eighty-five-from-the-archive-james-thurber Pacing This is a collection of short stories, so skip around. If you read a story you like, post about it. Please bookmark the thread to encourage discussion. References and Further Reading http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/james-thurber http://www.thurberhouse.org/about-james-thurber/ https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/januaryfebruary/feature/james-thurber-lost-most-his-eyesight-tragic-childhood-accide https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5003/james-thurber-the-art-of-fiction-no-10-james-thurber Final Note: Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 04:03
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James Thurber was cool, gonna read this. However it seems there's no Kindle version so I'm going to have to order a physical copy and wait for however long international shipping takes.
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Aug 3, 2017 10:08
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Groke posted:James Thurber was cool, gonna read this. If you live in Canada or Australia or some other non-US country, the fadedpage link has a .mobi file, which is functionally identical to an .azw file -- Amazon kindle .azw files are just .mobi ebook files with a different rhree letter file extension, and kindles can read them directly. http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20131017 Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Aug 3, 2017 |
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Aug 3, 2017 11:20
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Looks great, I'm looking forward to this. I'll be travelling some, so I'll load up the e-reader and hopefully I'll actually get around to it before the month is over.
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Aug 7, 2017 12:06
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I feel like I have pitched this insufficiently well It is funny and short and not-stupid and well-crafted and free, people
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Aug 9, 2017 21:39
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quote:Probably no one man should have as many dogs in his life as I have had, but there was more pleasure than distress in them for me
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Aug 10, 2017 03:41
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I feel like I have pitched this insufficiently well I'm picking it up on my next trip to the library. Should have it read by months end. Looks fun.
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Aug 10, 2017 17:34
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Good, quick read. The grandfather bits were the best, but there isn't a bad chapter in the book.
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Aug 11, 2017 19:06
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I have an old copy of "The Thurber Carnival" - I'm gonna cheat and read that instead. (And not just the cartoons this time!)
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Aug 13, 2017 02:31
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The first story is pretty great, a slapstick tale where everyone's confused and it just escalates the action more. The second story about the grandfather's senility was also good. It's enjoyable to be able to sit down and read a story quickly in a single sitting. I had read The Secret Life of Walter Mitty back when the movie came out. I liked the premise, but found the story to be a little underwhelming. I'm enjoying these personal anecdotes much more. The tongue-in-cheek self-loathing introduction won me over immediately.
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Aug 14, 2017 13:17
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Franchescanado posted:The first story is pretty great, a slapstick tale where everyone's confused and it just escalates the action more. The second story about the grandfather's senility was also good. Yeah, I'm about 2/3 through this now. The highs pretty good and I've had a lot of hearty chuckles. This very much seems like the sort of book that should be in a bathroom.
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Aug 14, 2017 17:07
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The Day The Dam Broke is a funny story of mass hysteria by happenstance and possibly humanity's fondness for prophecies of destruction, and it has an unfortunate illustration.
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Aug 15, 2017 00:13
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Franchescanado posted:The Day The Dam Broke is a funny story of mass hysteria by happenstance and possibly humanity's fondness for prophecies of destruction, and it has an unfortunate illustration. Yeah that may have been part of the thought process, I kinda have a theme this year I'm trying to mix in some happy stuff!
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Aug 15, 2017 00:19
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Franchescanado posted:The Day The Dam Broke is a funny story of mass hysteria by happenstance and possibly humanity's fondness for prophecies of destruction, and it has an unfortunate illustration. Hysteria by Happenstance is a nice summary of a number of these. It's not the only unfortunate drawing, unfortunately. Fortunately the unfortunate bits are surprisingly minimal, but there are some.
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Aug 15, 2017 15:34
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Ben Nevis posted:
Yeah there are a couple points where, just like Hugh Laurie's unfortunate blackface in the BBC production of Jeeves and Wooster, you wince and go "Ooooh that's not good." The "Sequence of Servants" short is fairly painful and a number of the drawings too (oddly, I can't remember seeing such drawings in any of his other works). But after all, considering the 1930's publication date, the author is drawing a picture of his time, and that kind of nonplussed incidental racism was typical. And it gives us something to talk about beyond "book good!" Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Aug 16, 2017 |
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Aug 16, 2017 02:44
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:But after all, considering the 1930's publication date, the author is drawing a picture of his time, and that kind of nonplussed incidental racism was typical. And it gives us something to talk about beyond "book good!" It's good to know that making fun of names is timeless. Given the era, I sorta expected more.
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Aug 16, 2017 18:26
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Another aspect of the book that I've been enjoying is how intentionally misleading the story titles are. "The Time The Dam Broke" doesn't have anything to do with a dam, "The Night of the Ghost" (or whatever) isn't about a ghost. It's even better when he starts to refer to other stories within the stories as fact, as he did in the ghost story by referencing the dam breaking.
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Aug 16, 2017 18:33
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Hahahaha oh my God, I read "The night the bed fell" in my middle or high school literature textbook and completely forgot about it. It's a new experience for me to read every sentence and clearly remember that I have read it before while at the same time unable to remember what the next sentence will be because it was so long ago... then the process repeats with each sentence. I guess this is what it's like to wait twenty years between readings?A hilarious man posted:The dog, who never did like Briggs, jumped for him--assuming that he was the culprit in whatever was going on-- I think it was this bit that got me the most. Just the idea that a dog would jump at the chance to scapegoat someone he didn't like because of this goddamn chaotic situation.
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Aug 17, 2017 04:17
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Fedelm posted:Hahahaha oh my God, I read "The night the bed fell" in my middle or high school literature textbook and completely forgot about it. It's a new experience for me to read every sentence and clearly remember that I have read it before while at the same time unable to remember what the next sentence will be because it was so long ago... then the process repeats with each sentence. I guess this is what it's like to wait twenty years between readings? That was part of the reason I picked it, or at least I was thinking in that general direction if not to that degree of specificity. Thurber is a weird author in that he's definitely part of "The Western Canon" but he's also just dated enough that most people will, at most, have read one or two stories in high school English anthologies (usually Walter Mitty) and moved on without ever going back -- but there's some real meat here, and some shorts that are genuinely brilliantly funny, yet nevertheless he's still getting close to that cusp where authors slip off of the generational radar. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Aug 17, 2017 |
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Aug 17, 2017 05:18
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Need suggestions for next month
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Aug 21, 2017 14:53
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Need suggestions for next month New suggestion: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Sanders quote:February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body. tl;dr - Willie Lincoln dies and hangs out in a graveyard with a bunch of ghosts stuck in the graveyard because their yearning for life is too strong to let them move on. Willie refuses to move on because he is waiting for his father to visit. It is unusual for a child's soul to linger, but Willie has a strong soul and becomes a curiosity to the other ghosts. The style's a little experimental, there are multiple (sometimes contradicting) narrators (almost all of them ghosts), we go in and out of the stories of the ghosts and the supernatural trials and tribulations of the graveyard (angels/demons, the inability to leave, the corporeal state dictated by how you died, etc), and there are digressions about life, death, loss, sorrow, beauty, love, and everything in between. It's funny, it's weird, it's creative as hell, it's new and common, and it's a really good quick read. Older book: The Peregrine by J.A. Baker. quote:From fall to spring, J.A. Baker set out to track the daily comings and goings of a pair of peregrine falcons across the flat fen lands of eastern England. He followed the birds obsessively, observing them in the air and on the ground, in pursuit of their prey, making a kill, eating, and at rest, activities he describes with an extraordinary fusion of precision and poetry. And as he continued his mysterious private quest, his sense of human self slowly dissolved, to be replaced with the alien and implacable consciousness of a hawk. tl;dr - This is a beautiful weird book that's been gaining some popularity in the Lit. Thread. It's short, around 200 pages, and despite the summary being short, there's a lot to discuss in it. Werner Herzog loves it.
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Aug 21, 2017 17:51
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Thanks, those are great suggestions! I suspect I'll read The Peregrine regardless, it sounds right up my alley. Any others? The criteria I generally look for are: 1) availability (out of copyright free download is best, ebook edition next best, out of print and difficult to obtain is disqualifying) 2) accessibility -- it doesn't have to be an easy book but clear accessible prose is a definite positive; more people are going to participate if we pick Hemingway instead of Faulkner. Similarly, a 200-pager is probably preferable to an 800 pager. 3) discussability -- doesn't have to be "literary" or necessarily even "good" but there should be enough meat there to prompt some discussion, otherwise what's the point? 4) Novelty -- something that's different from what we're all already reading anyway. This is why I rarely select genre fiction (the forum is full of that anyway) and why sometimes I try to prioritize female or minority or non-native-english authors. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Aug 24, 2017 |
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Aug 24, 2017 04:30
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i've wanted an excuse to read americanah for a while now it might also be nice to get a ferrante thread in before that hbo series comes out and ruins it
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Aug 24, 2017 05:30
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George Saunders is cool and good. In unrelated news I just got my hands on a copy of the Thurber, will commence reading shortly.
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Aug 24, 2017 11:33
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Some more short stories perhaps, or are you guys getting fed up with them? I love them, personally. Agnes Owens is pretty cool, and writes some moving stuff, she also writes very tenderly about gently caress-ups. Alasdair Gray described Owens as "the most unfairly neglected of all living Scottish authors". "Owens was born in 1926 in Milngavie just outside Glasgow. Her father, who lost a leg in the First World War, worked in a local paper mill. The family was poor, but not uncommonly so and, despite Owens being described as a “hopeless case” at school, they insisted she go to college to learn typing. She never ended up using the skills she acquired. Instead, she married a man recently returned from the Second World War and they had four children together. A man broken by war, her husband couldn’t stand fireworks, drank too much, and frequently ended up on the ward for alcoholics. “That was my happiest time, going to visit him,” she said, before the killer punchline: “It meant I didn’t have to put up with him back home.” He died at the age of 43 and Owens remarried and had another three children. In between bringing up her large family, working as a typist, in factories and cleaning, she began to write." Some other cool short stories are Robert E. Howards Conan stories. Great pulp, leaps from the page. Freely available since it was written 80 or so years ago. Might be interesting to reflect on how it influenced later fantasy works, as well as some of its inherent racism and sometimes problematic depictions of women (Some ladies in these stories own, some aren't much more interesting than action ladies in movies today). ovenboy fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Aug 24, 2017 |
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Aug 24, 2017 12:45
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I'm about to start on Doris Lessing's Shikasta, which is one of those books I've always meant to read but never quite gotten around to. From the looks of a quick skim, it's going to be either fascinating or incomprehensible. I've also suggested John Dos Passos's The 42nd Parallel, the first of his "U.S.A. Trilogy," before It's complex and fascinating, but not all that difficult a read once you get used to the structure.
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Aug 26, 2017 13:53
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Nonfiction: Team of Rivals: The president, a master negotiator, steers the country through its darkest days by winning the loyalties and affection of his cabinet, made up of willful, passionate men who disagree with each other about almost everything. The Apache Wars: Evenly told tale of the conquests and fight in Arizona, including the passions and racism that affected the region today Command and Control: the story of America's nuclear arsenal, and the extremely careful, clear thinking that it's leaders exercised over the decades to prevent these weapons from being used.
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Aug 27, 2017 01:38
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Captain Blood by Sabatini. It's a fun adventure that's out of copyright so free. Everyone loves pirates.
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Aug 28, 2017 18:00
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Ben Nevis posted:Captain Blood by Sabatini. It's a fun adventure that's out of copyright so free. Everyone loves pirates. Oooj, or maybe Scaramouche
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Aug 28, 2017 22:00
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Groke posted:In unrelated news I just got my hands on a copy of the Thurber, will commence reading shortly. About halfway through; this is some funny poo poo. (A hundred years ago, a private citizen could shoot at cops and survive? Oh well.)
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Aug 30, 2017 10:11
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Jumping into this way late, but I ordered my copy of this book and am way excited to read it. It sounds like it will be a lot of fun. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
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Sep 6, 2017 03:16
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