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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 September:Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay October: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a9YU1SVbSE Current: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WP7SZFB/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Or if it is out of copyright in your country: https://archive.org/details/maltesefalcon01hamm About the book: quote:The Maltese Falcon is a 1930 detective novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask beginning with the September 1929 issue. The story is told entirely in external third-person narrative; there is no description whatever of any character's internal thoughts or feelings, only what they say and do, and how they look. The novel has been adapted several times for the cinema. quote:The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not 'by hypothesis' incapable of anything. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the pedants will deny that it could be even better. -- Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder" quote:Raymond Chandler, who has yet to appear in this series, once said: “Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did, he did superbly.” He added, in a summary that helps define Hammett’s achievement: “He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” He also gave his characters a distinctive language and convincing motivations in a genre that had grown stereotyped, flaccid and uninvolving. About the Author(s) Dashiell Hammett! quote:Samuel Dashiell Hammett (/dəˈʃiːl ˈhæmɪt/;[2] May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse). quote:Although Hammett himself worked for a time as a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco (and used his given name, Samuel, for the story's protagonist), Hammett asserted that "Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and, in their cockier moments, thought they approached."[1] Themes Noir. Trust. Sex. Race. quote:Of course film noir was waiting to be born. It was already there in the novels of Dashiell Hammett, who wrote The Maltese Falcon, and the work of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, John O'Hara and the other boys in the back room. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,” wrote Chandler, and that was true of his hero Philip Marlowe (another Bogart character). But it wasn't true of Hammett's Sam Spade, whowasmean, and who set the stage for a decade in which unsentimental heroes talked tough and cracked wise. quote:To describe the plot in a linear and logical fashion is almost impossible. That doesn't matter. The movie is essentially a series of conversations punctuated by brief, violent interludes. It's all style. It isn't violence or chases, but the way the actors look, move, speak and embody their characters. Under the style is attitude: Hard men, in a hard season, in a society emerging from Depression and heading for war, are motivated by greed and capable of murder. For an hourly fee, Sam Spade will negotiate this terrain. Everything there is to know about Sam Spade is contained in the scene where Bridget asks for his help and he criticizes her performance: “You're good. It's chiefly your eyes, I think--and that throb you get in your voice when you say things like, 'be generous, Mr. Spade.' “ He always stands outside, sizing things up. Few Hollywood heroes before 1941 kept such a distance from the conventional pieties of the plot. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-maltese-falcon-1941  Apart from the obvious: quote:Sam Spade uses the word “gunsel” three times in reference to Wilmer, the hitman who works for Kasper Gutman, a.k.a. the Fat Man. Hammett used the same word in his novel, but only after his editor objected to the word he used first: "catamite," which is a young man kept by an older man for sexual purposes. While Hammett's novel identified Cairo (Peter Lorre’s character) as a homosexual and hinted at it for Wilmer and Gutman, this term was considered too explicit. Hammett replaced it with "gunsel," which his editor assumed meant “gunslinger” or some such. But it didn't. Gunsel—from the Yiddish word for "little goose," and passed along in American hobo culture—was merely a synonym for "catamite," but was too new to be familiar. Hammett got away with it in the book, and it slipped past the Production Code censors when it popped up in the screenplay. Because of Hammett's usage, the word came to take on "gunman" as a secondary meaning. But make no mistake, it wasn't Wilmer's possession of a firearm that Sam Spade was referring to. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/76041/13-mysterious-facts-about-maltese-falcon quote:The following year, Hammett released “The Maltese Falcon,” with its iconic, white private detective, Sam Spade. https://graphics.latimes.com/finding-marlowe/  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 The Simple Art of Murder, by Raymond Chandler: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b62d/a95d1fc9b94589375d364f3259f25c45ad8a.pdf "The Mystery of the Maltese Falcon," an investigation into whether or not the various movie prop falcons are "real" https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/02/mystery-of-the-maltese-falcon And of course the film. What are you doing here? Go watch it! Then read the book. Or the other way around! 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 13:27 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 13:23
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I don't want to post the whole thing here - or even heavily excerpt it - to give people a chance to read it themselves, but the first 4 pages of Chapter 7 (G In The Air) have always gotten a visceral reaction from me. I think there's a very important philosophical point there that I can't quite explain fully. ...so y'all lemme know when you get there and we can bounce it back and forth.
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Nov 5, 2019 14:43
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Man, I haven't read this in ages. I guess I have another re-read coming up.
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Nov 5, 2019 15:45
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Yeah, nice pick, time to re-read this.
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Nov 6, 2019 01:27
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just for reference:quote:$100 in 1941 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $1,746.66 in 2019, a difference of $1,646.66 over 78 years. So when she pays them $200 right at the beginning for a one day tail, she's paying more like $3,000 today. A lot of money for a day's work.
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Nov 10, 2019 17:11
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quote:hey rode half a dozen blocks in silence. The chauffeur said: "Your partner got knocked off, didn't he, Mr. Spade?" quote:However, before Hammett and Shaw had become such buddies, Hammett wrote a story which contained an expression that gave Shaw quite a jolt. He deleted it from the manuscript and wrote Hammett a chiding letter to the effect that Black Mask would never publish vulgarities of any sort.
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Nov 12, 2019 04:05
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Going to be reading the original serialized version of the Maltese Falcon published by Black Mask magazine, thanks to The Black Lizard Big Book Of Black Mask Stories @2010. According to Otto Penzler, editor of the Black Lizard imprint anthology.... quote:The book was dramatically revised after serialization, with more than two thousand textual differences between the two versions. Some of the changes were made by copy editors at Knopf but the majority appear to have been made by Hammett himself... So looks like my reading experience will be a slightly different experience than others in this thread. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Nov 13, 2019 |
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Nov 13, 2019 02:10
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I have both versions: it would be neat to compare the two. I might break out the Black Mask version after I finish the novel version. Just a few initial thoughts as I make my way through the first few chapters. It's so drat hard to hear Hammett in his own voice without having the movie overwrite most of it (I rarely watch movies more than once, but I must have seen the Bogart version a good half-dozen times). You get a line in the text like "Shoo her in, darling," said Spade. "Shoo her in." and there's no dialogue tags, just (easily interpreted) context, but Bogart's slightly comical eagerness as he delivers it comes through loud and clear in my mind. Hammett best comes out on his own in the non-dialogue parts, of course, but also in the bits the Hays Code censors would hit. "You killed my husband, Sam, be kind to me". He clapped his palms together and said: "Jesus Christ". When the police visit Spade after his partner is killed, you get a long-since cliched scene of the police brass warning the PI that one day he's going to go too far. The original Falcon story ran in 1929-30: I have a decent pulp collection, but only one issue from before that date, and it doesn't have any PI stuff in it, so I don't know if such a scene was already cliched in 1930, or if Hammett was one of the major figures that made it so. "He was quite six feet tall". It's interesting, because you only ever see that formulation today in the negative: "he was not quite six feet tall". "I'd as lief not have him not have him think there's something anything to be kept quiet." "lief" was not a word I was familiar with; I'm sure I thought it was a typo the first time I read this. "The upper part of his face frowned. The lower part smiled." That's some trick. Xotl fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Nov 13, 2019 |
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Nov 13, 2019 07:41
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Definitely found Sam Spade saccharine in comparison to Hammett's earlier "zero fucks given" Continental Op private detective character when I first read Maltese Falcon (novel version), going to see how that holds up on a re-read. And going to see how Spade holds up in comparison to the other 49 or so crime fiction stories in the Black Lizard-Black Mask anthology. 4 chapters into the serialized version of MF, less detailed clothing descriptions vs the novel, are the biggest changes I've detected between the two versions so far.
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Nov 13, 2019 14:57
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quantumfoam posted:Definitely found Sam Spade saccharine in comparison to Hammett's earlier "zero fucks given" Continental Op private detective character when I first read Maltese Falcon (novel version), going to see how that holds up on a re-read. I would think not well. Spade gives very few fucks in the Maltese Falcon (consider the manipulation included in all his personal relationships and how willing he is to make sure whoever takes the fall in the end isn't him, whether the fall guy is guilty or not).
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Nov 13, 2019 17:53
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Finished the Black Mask original version of Maltese Falcon. Spade was definitely saccharine with his secretary Effie Perine, but that was about it. Biggest difference with the more well-known book version of Maltese Falcon was the 1/2 page of story recap that headed off each new months installment of the serialized Maltese Falcon story, slightly less ornate descriptions, and a note from the editor that comes off as adorable decades after the fact. quote:To our readers: quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Nov 13, 2019 |
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Nov 13, 2019 22:57
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Finally finished up what I was reading to get back into this one. I haven't re-read Hammett in ages. It's probably inconsequential, but since version came up, I'll be reading from The Library of America's Hammett: Complete Novels. It's apparently the 1930 first printing as a novel.
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Nov 15, 2019 22:43
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Dashiell Hammett is perhaps one of my favourite authors, but I'm going to take an unpopular opinion stance and say that The Maltese Falcon is perhaps my least favourite of his novels (my favourite being Red Harvest). I read this book for the first time only a year ago but I remember being kind of soured by just how... cool Sam is. I got used to the unsentimental Continental Op and his crew. Spade isn't exactly sentimental either but there's something in the narrative voice that surrounds him that feels... I'm not sure how to put my finger on it, but he felt more untouchable than the Op ever did. That said, Spade does unravel pretty spectacularly in the last few chapters in a way he never did in the movie. I got used to him being the smartest, most prepared guy in the room, so it was interesting when he started to lose his grip on the situation. Anyway, it's still a fantastic book. I really enjoyed this thread, especially the 'gunsel' trivia, which I've never heard before. loving amazing that the Yiddish slang for 'twink' became a synonym for yegg.
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Nov 16, 2019 17:12
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The Flitcraft story that Spade tells to O’Shaughnessy as they wait for Joel Cairo to show up is rather odd. I can't understand what purpose it serves, though I've seen several attempts to justify it. It's in the Black Mask original so it's not filler added to bulk up the novel, but it really feels like filler, especially in such an otherwise economical story, and I can see why Huston axed it.
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Nov 18, 2019 03:55
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Xotl posted:The Flitcraft story that Spade tells to O’Shaughnessy as they wait for Joel Cairo to show up is rather odd. I can't understand what purpose it serves, though I've seen several attempts to justify it. It's in the Black Mask original so it's not filler added to bulk up the novel, but it really feels like filler, especially in such an otherwise economical story, and I can see why Huston axed it. Feel that it was a sort of a spoiler to the entire story plotwise, and would have telegraphed the ending of the movie if it was included. People don't really change, even if they think they did O’Shaughnessy was always going to use men as stupid meat-shields and lie-lie-lie when asked questions. Cairo was always going to be untrustworthy, and triple-cross. Gutman was always going to think himself above the law/smarter than everyone else and underestimate people. The tiny guy was always going to "explode" at whatever angered him. Spade was always going to look out for his best interests.
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Nov 18, 2019 06:54
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Xotl posted:The Flitcraft story that Spade tells to O’Shaughnessy as they wait for Joel Cairo to show up is rather odd. That's my favorite bit. As quantumfoam notes below, it does telegraph the ending, but it also translates Robert Browning (your ghost will walk, you lover of trees...in an English lane) into noir. People can and will get used to anything.
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Nov 18, 2019 14:48
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I've always read it as a comment on the Falcon itself. The Falcon is this extraordinary lightning bolt everyone thinks will change their lives forever. But it won't change what any of them are.
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Nov 18, 2019 15:18
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Just finished and it's been awhile, but Spade is way too casual about leaving guns with untrustworthy people. The big reveal in the last chapter was something he had to have realized earlier, but strung along anyways. Why not just tip the cops on the whole thing and cut loose there? Why risk the gunplay, druggings, beatings, etc?
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Nov 19, 2019 23:24
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Just finished it myself. Reading it I'm left with a lot of admiration for Huston for the way he edited things. It's no L.A. Confidential editing (it didn't need to be), but he really did know how to cut just right. It's interesting how he seems to have heavily altered the ending after getting underway, if the supposed script I've found online is to be trusted. That script has the mention of Gutman being killed, and the end scene being Iva showing up at the office just like the novel. Both cut the extra bits about how Archer was someone Spade hated from the start and was even looking to get rid of, however. I think I like that cut. It's clear through subtler mentions that Spade didn't like Archer; we didn't need to have it shoved in our faces. And for all that the movie used pretty much just novel lines, I had forgotten that the legendary closing line wasn't in the book. Now I'm going to have to revisit Red Harvest. EDIT: A story I came across as to why the movie is so faithful to the original text (The Library Quarterly, 1974): quote:There is a well-known anecdote about the scripting of the 1941 film version of Dashiell Hammett's archetypal hard-boiled detective novel. John Huston, then a scriptwriter at Warner Brothers, convinced studio head Jack Warner to allow him to direct a third film version of The Maltese Falcon. Warner gave his consent with the stipulation that Huston work up an acceptable script for the project before he gave his final approval. The aspiring young director was to work with veteran writer Allen Rivkin on the scenario. The two scriptwriters decided that the most logical first step in the process of turning Hammett's novel into cinematic form would be to have their secretary type up the dialogue from the book, dividing it into scenes as it seemed appropriate. Xotl fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 06:13
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Ben Nevis posted:Just finished and it's been awhile, but Spade is way too casual about leaving guns with untrustworthy people. The big reveal in the last chapter was something he had to have realized earlier, but strung along anyways. Why not just tip the cops on the whole thing and cut loose there? Why risk the gunplay, druggings, beatings, etc? I think that's partly because Spade is just that cool and badass and cool guys don't look at explosions, partly because Spade is slapdash and sloppy and not as competent as he presents himself to be, and partly because Spade, like everyone else, was trying to get rich. It's easy to forget but when Gutman promises him $10,000, that's about $175,000 in today's money.
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Nov 20, 2019 13:19
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Need suggestions for next month. Right now I'm thinking Moby Dick.
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Nov 22, 2019 13:25
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Spade was definitely a low-grade fuckup like his dead business partner Miles Archer. Besides that, almost everyone should be able to agree: Effine Perine needed a raise. Suggesting one of Mary Roach's non-fiction books for next's months BotM. Any of them would work, however I'm specifically nominating Mary Roach's Packing for Mars. e: Also, was I the only one who had to look up what excelsior the physical material was when reading the Maltese Falcon? quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Nov 22, 2019 |
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Nov 22, 2019 23:56
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quantumfoam posted:e: Also, was I the only one who had to look up what excelsior the physical material was when reading the Maltese Falcon? No: I had to as well. It sounded like some sort of Stan Lee mustache wax or something.
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Nov 23, 2019 00:04
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quantumfoam posted:e: Also, was I the only one who had to look up what excelsior the physical material was when reading the Maltese Falcon? Xotl posted:No: I had to as well. It sounded like some sort of Stan Lee mustache wax or something. I didn't. I had already looked it up from reading Nero Wolfe.
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Nov 23, 2019 02:26
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I love reading these and coming across that stuff, like looking up "majolica" when you read Chandler.
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Nov 23, 2019 02:46
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I just assumed it was another word for used newspaper.
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Nov 23, 2019 02:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I just assumed it was another word for used newspaper. Nope!  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_wool
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Nov 23, 2019 02:57
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https://twitter.com/beatonna/status/1200888871174709249?s=20
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Dec 1, 2019 00:39
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Unless something or someone changes my mind in the next 36 hours, it'll be MOBY DICK for December. BIG WHALE ENERGY
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Dec 2, 2019 03:27
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Thought one of the goals of SomethingAwful BotM was to alternate between fiction and non-fiction every so often. Hard pass on Moby Dick, at least for me. Repeating my solitary vote for Mary Roach's Packing for Mars.
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Dec 2, 2019 06:19
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ladies and gentlemen, on the one hand we have moby dick and on the other we have some dumbass pop science crapola from a bestseller list.. the choice is yours
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Dec 2, 2019 06:45
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How about a happy compromise: Mutiny on the Bounty Trilogy. Books 1 & 2 have hot naval action and travelling to the unknown, book 3 takes you to the remote space colony of Pitcairn's Island.
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Dec 2, 2019 12:44
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How about Moby-Dick?
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Dec 2, 2019 13:37
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quantumfoam posted:Thought one of the goals of SomethingAwful BotM was to alternate between fiction and non-fiction every so often. It is, or rather just general variety is, but right now I'm crazy busy and so I'm basically picking greatest hits because I keep forgetting to put up a poll in time. I'll do a nonfiction poll for January.
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Dec 2, 2019 16:19
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Voting for Moby Dick
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Dec 2, 2019 23:18
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Yeah I'd do Moby Dick. Hard pass on Packing for Mars.
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Dec 3, 2019 06:25
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