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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 2016, refer to archives] 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 August: My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber September: The Peregrine by J.A. Baker October: Blackwater Vol. I: The Flood by Michael McDowell November: Aquarium by David Vann December: Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight [Author Unknown] 2018 January: Njal's Saga [Author Unknown] February: The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle March: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders April: Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria May: Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov June: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe July: Warlock by Oakley Hall August: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriott September: The Magus by John Fowles October: I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara November: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard December: Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens 2019: January: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky February: BEAR by Marian Engel March: V. by Thomas Pynchon April: The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout May: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman June: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann July: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach August: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay  Current: Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Hanging-Rock-Penguin-Classics-ebook/dp/B01E6G6GWO (Two dollars!) If it is out of copyright in your country: https://archive.org/details/PicnicAtHangingRockByJoanLindsay About the book: quote:Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important. quote:Picnic at Hanging Rock is an Australian historical fiction novel by Joan Lindsay. Set in 1900, it is about a group of female students at an Australian girls' boarding school who vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine's Day picnic, and the effects the disappearances have on the school and local community. The novel was first published in 1967 in Australia by Cheshire Publishing and was reprinted by Penguin in 1975. It is widely considered by critics to be one of the best Australian novels. quote:Lindsay claimed to have written the novel based on an idea she had in a dream. In a 2017 article in The Age, it was noted: "The dream had centred on a summer picnic at a place called Hanging Rock, which Joan knew well from her childhood holidays. Joan told Rae [her housekeeper] that the dream had felt so real that when she awoke at 7.30am, she could still feel the hot summer breeze blowing through the gum trees and she could still hear the peals of laughter and conversation of the people she'd imagined, and their gaiety and lightness of spirit as they set out on their joyful picnic expedition."[5] About the Author(s) quote:Joan à Beckett Lindsay (16 November 1896 – 23 December 1984), also known as Lady Lindsay,[2][3] was an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and visual artist. Trained in her youth as a painter, Lindsay published her first literary work in 1936 at age forty under a pseudonym, a satirical novel titled Through Darkest Pondelayo. Her second novel, Time Without Clocks, was published nearly thirty years later, and was a semi-autobiographical account of her early married years to artist Daryl Lindsay. quote:IT WAS the sort of suitably unnerving moment a fan of the book might have expected to transpire when an audience gathered at Melbourne’s State Theatre in 1975 for the Victorian premiere of the film adaptation of Picnic At Hanging Rock. https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/l...a8abb4c6b1fe174 Themes quote:Well, it was written as a mystery and it remains a mystery. If you can draw your own conclusions, that's fine, but I don't think that it matters. I wrote that book as a sort of atmosphere of a place, and it was like dropping a stone into the water. I felt that story, if you call it a story—that the thing that happened on St. Valentine's Day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles.[19] quote:Picnic at Hanging Rock is considered by many critics to be one of the best Australian novels.[26][27] Much of the critical and scholarly interest in the novel has centered on its mysterious conclusion, as well as its depiction of Australia's natural environment in contrast with the Victorian population of the newly established British colony. In 1987, literary scholar Donald Bartlett drew comparisons between Lindsay's treatment of the rock with that of Malabar Hill in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, which has been interpreted as a metaphor for Pan, the Greek god of the wild: "There is more, of course, to A Passage to India than Pan motifs, for example symbols such as the snake, the wasp and the undying worm, not to mention the vast panorama of India's religions. But I believe it probable that Joan Lindsay consciously borrowed the elements [from A Passage to India]."[29] quote:At Hanging Rock we've become obsessed with the myth almost to the point where we sort of tell it as though it is a true story, but we completely ignore the true losses that have happened there. Most of the Aboriginal people living in that area died of smallpox or were murdered by colonists or removed to Coranderrk [Aboriginal Reserve in Healesville] in 1836 ... It's just fascinating to me that we keep choosing to be haunted by a [fictitious] story rather than the real losses that have occurred in that place.[19] Pacing Read as thou wilt is the whole of the law. Please post after you read! Please bookmark the thread to encourage discussion. References and Further Materials quote:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-picnic-at-hanging-rock-1975 quote:It is 43 years since Peter Weir bolstered the emerging Australian new wave with the extraordinary Picnic at Hanging Rock. His cinematic adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s beguiling mystery novel is a gorgeously photographed, unsettling, eerie tale that remains potent today. Its dreamlike mixture of horror, mystery and barely suppressed sapphic love stayed with audiences long after they left theatres. The reboot that begins on BBC Two on Wednesday starring Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer is further evidence it is a story that just won’t die. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jul/10/picnic-at-hanging-rock-a-beguiling-story-that-just-wont-die Link to 1975 film version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBjHkpbCI4s Suggestions for Future Months These threads aren't just for discussing the current BOTM; If you have a suggestion for next month's book, please feel free to post it in the thread below also. Generally what we're looking for in a BotM are works that have 1) accessibility -- either easy to read or easy to download a free copy of, ideally both 2) novelty -- something a significant fraction of the forum hasn't already read 3) discussability -- intellectual merit, controversiality, insight -- a book people will be able to talk about. Final Note: Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 17:07
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The first few pages sure talk a lot more about breasts than I'd normally expect from a straight female author.
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Sep 7, 2019 12:21
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Need suggestions for next month!
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Sep 22, 2019 13:14
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Unless there's a rebellion the plan is to do Maltese Falcon next month. Miraculously, we've never done it, and it's in the public domain in Canada!
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Sep 30, 2019 00:39
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No time to do a poll, but someone suggested Lovecraft Country as a botm. Anyone read it? Is it good? Hrm. Maybe Her Body and Other Parties Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Oct 1, 2019 |
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Oct 1, 2019 11:20
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MockingQuantum posted:I would be strongly in favor of Kwaidan, or really any decent collection of spooky stories. I didn't see the Kwaidan discussion but I'll keep it in mind for future months. Next month's selection will be Her Body and Other Parties, which is a short story collection, has been popular in recent polls, and apparently has some horror themes.
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Oct 2, 2019 00:27
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