book club

i'll be reading ellison's "invisible man" for class this semester, maybe we could organise around that...

a chapter a week, and no reading ahead!!

who's interested?

tho it mught be better to start with something shorter...

i haven't r3ad invisible man...

non-fiction maybe?

And I think Umberto Eco's new book and Invisible Man are both good suggestions...

It seems that fiction is easier to discuss than non-fiction...there's more room for interpretation.

i need to know more.

i would like to try to do this, if i can't keep up with y'all i'll just try again on the next one (i don't read much, unfortunately, but maybe this will help me keep at it)

"It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story.

Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts--a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. When still a boy he meets a foreign commander in the woods, charming him with his quick wit and lively mind. The commander--who proves to be Emperor Frederick Barbarossa--adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of fearless, adventurous friends.

Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, this merry band sets out in search of Prester John, a legendary priest-king said to rule over a vast kingdom in the East--a phantasmagorical land of strange creatures with eyes on their shoulders and mouths on their stomachs, of eunuchs, unicorns, and lovely maidens.

As always with Eco, this abundant novel includes dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, extraordinary feeling, and vicarious reflections on our postmodern age. This is Eco the storyteller at his brilliant best."

the english translation will be available for shoplifting on Oct. 15

I was in a real-world reading club about ten years ago, for a while. It was generally middlebrow literary stuff - most Booker nominees would have been ideal. The mechanism, which I mention as a possible one to use here, is that we would agree a term's list in advance (it was run in a local college so took those breaks), and we would know what book we were going to discuss each week at least a month before. Someone would sort of lead/introduce each book, we would all be given a chance for our say, and general open discussion was pretty limited. Since there is no time/space limit here, that stuff is irrelevant, and anyone can put in their comments anytime. However, I would not be interested if it's a chapter-a-week basis. I'd rather say that we will open discussion of Book A (nominations and voting for a list, maybe) on, say, November 1st; talk about book B will begin on Nov 8th (or after whatever agreed interval); and so on.

A list means that those without time for a book a week can pick and choose, setting the dates way in advance gives us time to find and read the book at our own pace, and we aren't imposing an intolerably slow rate for others - if you're fast and have time you can leave it until October 30th to start reading! We could make nominations for books we'd be interested in doing - maybe put all those that get two nominations to a vote to compose the advance list.

I'll post some things I fancy reading tomorrow, see if any are of wider interest.

I ought to leave the question of discussion frequency up to the employed swine among us, as I actually have nothing to do BUT read lately, but the potential for chaos in a weekly setup appeals to me--the result would be a nicely decentralized discussion system. I imagine that there would be concurrent discussions on several different books- which i find more in the spirit of ile than a monolithic READ THESE PAGES BY FRIDAY sorta system.

and i second Ned's alternating fiction with non-fiction idea.
i have been feasting on the bloated corpse of fiction for too long, and have grown fat and listless.

Fiction:
Faulkner - Sound and The Fury
Thomas Pynchon - Crying of Lot 49
Proust - Swann's Way
Italo Calvino- If on a winter's night a traveler
Joyce - Dubliners
Nabokov - Pale Fire
Dostoevsky - Notes From Underground
Tolstoy - Death of Ivan Ilych
Solzhenitsyn - Matryona's House
a bunch from the 20th century Russian Reader edited by Clarence Brown

Non-Fiction:
Stephen Hawkins - A Brief History of Time
Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe
G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy
George Smoot - Wrinkles in Time

but I'm open to pretty much anything not very bad

and a shorter list of non-fiction:
Gilbert Adair - Surfing The Zeitgeist (criticism)
Will Self - Sore Sites (on architecture - remaindered in the UK)
Keith Waterhouse - English Our English (on good writing)
Jon Savage - England's Dreaming (on punk)
Ronin Ro - Have Gun Will Travel (on Death Row Records)

More nominations? Votes on those already suggested (not just by me, obviously - Baudolino by Umberto Eco should also be counted, I think)? Who is interested at all?

(since this is something which would need a whole crop of threads, wouldn't it require its own board?)

How about if we start voting for what to read? Not to close off nominations, but how about we name five books, either already mentioned or new, that we want to do. The ones that get most support can be the first couple we do, and then we can reassess continuing, schedules and selection processes after that. By the way, do tell me to bugger off if you don't like my taking charge if this - I really don't want to seem as if I'm imposing anything on anyone.

My five, all from my own list, unsurprisingly:
Steve Erickson - Tours Of The Black Clock
Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2
George Konrad - The Loser
Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana - Zeke & Ned
Will Self - Sore Sites (on architecture - remaindered in the UK, but may not be available in the US - anyone know? If it isn't available, I'll have Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as my reserve choice!)

Well, the title alone, after all. :-)

Here are my nominations (chosen because they're on my list, anyway, and they seem like books people here could be interested in and entertained by):

Empire Falls by Richard Russo
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Number9Dream by David Mitchell
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
and I'll second Blood Meridian, since I've never read any Cormac McCarthy

It's quite possible some of these books aren't available yet outside the U.S. (oh, and Martin, it looks like Sore Sites would be tough to get here), so I'll have Rules of Attraction (as I haven't read any Bret Easton Ellis, either), as my alternate.

We read some classic book club books and some not so classic:

Diary of a Geisha by Arthur Elgar
The White Bone
'Tis by Frank McCourt
Bridget Jones' Diary (summer book club on the beach selection)
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (! -- X-mas holiday homework selection)
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Letham
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
A script written by one of our members
and a bunch of others I don't recall.

We took turns hosting and whoever was hosting chose the book. It was all very casual -- reading the book was optional, even for the hostess, but again, this was more of a social thing than most book clubs.

I'm terrible about reading the books in time, but it seems to me that it might be fun for you to conduct at least part of the ILE book club as a live internet chat at an agreed time or times, and you could always post the transcript for people to continue responding to later.

Jonathan Lethem / Motherless Brooklyn (and)
Ellison / The Invisible Man

and suggest:

A L Kennedy / So I am Glad (hello david howie).
Doris Lessing / Martha Quest
(and)
Alan Warner / Morvern Callar (because there's so my hype around the film and it puts me off a bit but I'd quite like to force myself to read it).

But I don't care if you ignore these. I'd rather have the incentive to read something I probably otherwise wouldn't.

Curiously, Morvern Callar was one of the first books we did and also received one of the worst overall ratings (yes, we marked books out of 100 in a kind of only semi-joking way). I remember one of my female friends objections was that it was clearly written by a man as the idea of warming one's knickers on the kettle was v.unrealistic.

Books that got the highest approval:

THE WIND UP BIRD CHRONICLE by Haruki Murakami
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes

Books that got the highest disapproval:
Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
Hotel World by Ali Smith (though by this stage there were only about three of us in attendance)

Books that divided us most:
The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Night by Elie Weisel
The Inimitable Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

Honorary mention for 'interesting discussion':
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Now that I've left London they are planning on starting it up again. With Roy Keane's autobiography.

i tried to stick to a partial book club reading program:
i've read invisible man, and i just finished Baudolino last night. am i the only one who's read it?

[hello inter-friendlies!]

So once again, please keep it going. If for some reason you can't/don't want to, thanks for doing it thus far, it was much more valuable than some of you can ever imagine.

I am one of those people who helped to nominate books initially and then didn't participate. I didn't lose interest. I never finished Invisible Man! I am a jerk.

So....

Uncle Tom's Cabin, anyone?

yes

must revisit a library tomorrow for the first time in like 18 months tho

i'm in!

deadline? 2 weeks?

Let's give ppl time to find and read the book; I say Aug 1.

okay! are we allowed to post as we read? i think there's probably little danger of spoiling?

Last time I think we had a separate thread to actually talk about the book. Let me look...

Book Club: Invisible Man

lol at the revive

k this sounds good.

oh wow bummer i missed invisible man!

I'm in! I'll have it read over the weekend after the bar exam, when my brane is running like an out-of-control sports car down a mountain, and will need something to slow down on.

It's available free online if you want to read it that way, google for "uncle tom's cabin text".

AAGH

i forgot about this till just now

are we still down? i think maybe an uncle toms cabin discussion thread should be started

Okay, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, so I'm in.

Isn't it meant to be quite difficult to get the original version since there've been so many abridged versions? Someone told me that once

i dunno but im hitting up the local library in t-15 mins so ill let u know

We should still do this, but remember that the deadline to finish the book is Aug 1; I don't think we're in any rush to start a thread.

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/StoCabi.html

theres no rush but it might be a decent idea to pique interest & allow ongoing commentary

im not gonna start it obv but i hope someone will

i will do this unless i start reading it and decide it sucks, at which point i will read something else.

COMMITMENT THY NAME IS ME

Well, I can see where the English major thing didn't pan out.

i started to read it online but there were, like, too many commas

i spend way 2 much time on em but there is no way im reading this fucking thing at a computer myself

GOT IT YO

who is with me?

Is this actually happening?

i'm going to reread this book and post about it even if noone else does.

K. I'm your Huckleberry.

yay!

I've read two chapters. So at this rate I might be done by Christmas.

(I'll try to do better, though.)

could we extend the deadline *? i'd like to participate but i'll be on holiday for the next week sans pc/book.

*to say, 20th aug?

Mickey and I had like a two-person Russian lit bookclub thing last summer! It was way fun.

This incarnation looks interesting:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61ynMoMf06L.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PKYGVNWWL._SL500_BO2,204,203,200_PIlitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_OU01_AA240_SH20_.jpg

I like NOrton Critical Editions too.

I'm still reading, so I'm all for extending deadline... Aug. 20. Hey, I might actually finish by then! Maybe.