BOTM POLL: Speptembrah!

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Faites vos jeux! This poll is closed.
Convenience Store Woman	9	26.47%
The Fire Is Upon Us	3	8.82%
The Satanic Verses	10	29.41%
All Tomorrows	6	17.65%
Against Nature	6	17.65%
Total:	18 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

Help us pick the September 2022 Book of the Month!

Vote for as many options as you think you might read.

If you have another suggestion, list it in a comment with a note explaining why it's a better pick. If you do vote, please consider participating and reading along. Poll will stay up for five days.

1) Convenience Store Woman by Sakaya Murata

quote:

Convenience Store Woman (Japanese: コンビニ人間, Hepburn: Konbini Ningen) is a 2016 novel by Japanese writer Sayaka Murata. It captures the atmosphere of the familiar convenience store that is so much part of life in Japan. The novel won the Akutagawa Prize in 2016.[4] Aside from working as a writer, Murata worked at a convenience store three times a week, basing her novel on her experiences. It was first published in the June 2016 issue of Bungakukai.[5] It was published as a book in July 2016 by Bungeishunjū.

quote:

Keiko Furukura is a 36-year old woman who has been working part-time at a convenience store, or konbini, for the last 18 years. She has known since childhood that she is "different" and that expressing her own views and actions is inexplicable and distressing to others, and causes problems.

The highly regulated world of the konbini, where each action is prescribed by the corporate manual, allows her to maintain an identity acceptable to those around her and a sense of purpose. She models her behaviour, dress style, and even speech patterns on those of her coworkers. Keiko maintains some friendships and a relationship with her sister, but finds it increasingly difficult to explain why, after 18 years, she is still single and working as a temp in a convenience store.

2) The Fire Is Upon Us

quote:

On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro," and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, and how the debate and the decades-long clash between the men illuminates the racial divide that continues to haunt America today.

3) The Satanic Verses

quote:

The Satanic Verses is the fourth novel of American-British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie. First published in September 1988, the book was inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the Satanic Verses, a group of Quranic verses about three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Al-Uzza, and Manāt.[1] The part of the story that deals with the "satanic verses" was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari.[1]

The book received wide critical acclaim, was a 1988 Booker Prize finalist (losing to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda), and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.[2] Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain".

. . .

The Satanic Verses consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism,[citation needed] interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The frame narrative, like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specialises in playing Hindu deities (the character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and N. T. Rama Rao).[6] Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a voiceover artist in England.

At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain.[7] The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gabriel and Chamcha that of a devil. Chamcha is arrested and passes through an ordeal of police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant.

4) All Tomorrows

quote:

All Tomorrows: A Billion Year Chronicle of the Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man is a 2006 work of science fiction and speculative evolution written and illustrated by the Turkish artist C. M. Kosemen under the pen name Nemo Ramjet. It explores a hypothetical future path of human evolution set from the near future to a billion years from the present. Several future human species evolve through natural means and through genetic engineering, conducted by both humans themselves and by a mysterious and superior alien species called the Qu.

Inspired by the science fiction works of Olaf Stapledon and Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Kosemen worked on All Tomorrows from 2003 to the publication of the book as a free PDF file online in 2006. The book has never been physically published, but as per Kosemen himself "had a life of its own" on the internet. Kosemen intends to eventually publish All Tomorrows in physical form, with new text and updated illustrations.

5) Against Nature

quote:

� rebours (French pronunciation: [a ʁ(ə).buʁ]; translated Against Nature or Against the Grain) is an 1884 novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. The narrative centers on a single character: Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete. The last scion of an aristocratic family, Des Esseintes loathes nineteenth-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. The narrative is almost entirely a catalogue of the neurotic Des Esseintes's aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, painting, and religion, and hyperaesthesic sensory experiences.

� rebours contains many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from Naturalism and became the ultimate example of "Decadent" literature,[1] inspiring works such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).[2] In his preface for the 1903 publication of the novel, Huysmans wrote that he had the idea to portray a man "soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings ... each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewellery, perfumes, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant."[3]

# ? Aug 28, 2022 20:43

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# ? May 4, 2024 21:47

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

sorry for delay, it'll be satanic verses. I ll get a thread up tomorrow.

# ? Sep 5, 2022 03:30

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 haven't gotten a thread up yet because of

https://images.app.goo.gl/bXKKXvb2U5nk5i1k6

Sorry all

# ? Sep 8, 2022 17:12

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I haven't gotten a thread up yet because of

https://images.app.goo.gl/bXKKXvb2U5nk5i1k6

Sorry all

You need to stop getting distracted by pictures of naked women. Also, please tag as not worksafe.

Yeesh, where�s a mod when you need one

# ? Sep 9, 2022 20:42

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've failed to get a thread up this month and I've got too much upcoming to get it done soon. We can just use this thread for any discussion or someone else can put up a thread for it if they want.

# ? Sep 18, 2022 20:15

Vienna Circlejerk: Jan 28, 2003; The great science sausage party!

I want to read this but I'm sitting at #43 in line for one of the library's 34 copies. I started at over 60 when the poll went up so there's hope.

# ? Sep 19, 2022 15:47

Lawman 0: Aug 17, 2010

I'm gonna read Convenience Store Woman I think.

# ? Sep 20, 2022 03:01

Lawman 0: Aug 17, 2010

What's the next botm?

# ? Sep 27, 2022 19:08

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# ? May 4, 2024 21:47

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

Actually this is as good a place as any to ask.

I'm thinking about restructuring the BOTM as a single ongoing thread at this point, maybe more a "book club" than a "book of the month" club. . What do people think of / want from the botm going forward? Should we be re-organizing it ? Thoughts preferences suggestions?

# ? Sep 28, 2022 16:26

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > BOTM POLL: Speptembrah!