The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Arts & Entertainment => Topic started by: side_show on July 18, 2005, 05:15:27 pm
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Books on the list that do not win will be carried over to September's list of potential books, so don't be worried if you see more than one book you want to read, just vote for what you wanna' read first!
As the organizer of the book club I will abstain from voting, but will make the deciding vote in case of a tie.
The book o' the month will be declaired on Monday July 25th 2005 @ noon CST, giving you a week to vote, and a week pick up the book, and readers should seek to be done reading whichever book is selected by Aug. 31st.
Have at it!
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Whoo hoo, my choice is winning. Take that Geek Love. Yeah, suck it.
~Paul
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Paul, you get better every day. Every god damned day.
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If by tomorrow my choice isn't winning I'll just go into the database and make it win anyway.
Because I fuck*ng can.
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Welcome to the Jough-will-tell-you-what-the-fuck-you-will-read-and-you-will-fuck*ng-like-it club.
Also - Jough and mods can you see who is voting and for what? I always wondered that.
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No, the DB does not keep track of who votes for what - only that a certain user voted in a certain poll (so they can't vote again).
Personally, I think you should be able to alter your vote, but I guess that could create problems.
Whatever. My choice is winning, so I'm happy.
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I voted for American Gods, as I haven't got round to it yet, but have always meant to.
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I voted for American Gods because I just got my copy last week. I tried getting my SO to suggest it to her book club and one guy was really into but everybody else decided they'd already read too many male writers.
Life is hard.
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Was it the sort of book club where the expression "Too Many Male Writers" =1?
Also, have any of you read a book called "Things Fall Apart" or "A Man of the People" by Chinua Achebe or Alan Dean Paton's "Cry the Beloved Country" (which I read 10 years before Oprah, just to be clear) - these are pretty interesting books dealing with the lingering effect of colonialism and politics in Africa (Achebe) and life under Apartheid (Paton).
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Was it the sort of book club where the expression "Too Many Male Writers" =1?
Also, have any of you read a book called "Things Fall Apart" or "A Man of the People" by Chinua Achebe or Alan Dean Paton's "Cry the Beloved Country" (which I read 10 years before Oprah, just to be clear) - these are pretty interesting books dealing with the lingering effect of colonialism and politics in Africa (Achebe) and life under Apartheid (Paton).
No, it was just more like 6 men in a row. Although as I've said before my SO is a professional feminist.
I read Things Fall Apart for a history class. I'm pretty sure I still have the essay floating around somewhere.
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Yeah, I read Things Fall Apart in college, too. Might have been for Freshman Comp. I think it's floating around here sompelace. It was good.
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I was taking a comparative lit class (I LOVED those)...I'm looking at my posts and it seems like my taste in novels runs to the socio-political. I also enjoyed "The Color Purple" as a book. I don't know much about many of the books in the poll - do any run strongly in socio-political themes, particularly outside of the US?
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I was taking a comparative lit class (I LOVED those)...I'm looking at my posts and it seems like my taste in novels runs to the socio-political. I also enjoyed "The Color Purple" as a book. I don't know much about many of the books in the poll - do any run strongly in socio-political themes, particularly outside of the US?
I, too, loved The Color Purple. I felt sort of weird about it, since I hated Beloved very much, but Purple was just... better.
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I took a first-year university class while I was still in high school where Things Fall Apart was my central book of study, and infact, since I alphabetized my library, it's the first book on the shelf. All of you are on mark here - it lends it self well to compairative study. Achebe wrote one of the best studies of Heart of Darkness that I ever read, in fact.
I'd be up for reading Things Fall Apart again. Shall we put it on the September list for possible books?
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I think it would be very interesting to re-read some of the books I had to read for classes as an independent grownup....except Great Expectations. Boo to that.
I would like to see on future lists books written by authors who are not American or European. Maybe every other month, a list of novels from nations where English isn't the primary language spoken? I would enjoy that. Recently I've noticed more books from Indian and Central/South American writers on the shelves. I would love the excuse to read them...
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I think it would be very interesting to re-read some of the books I had to read for classes as an independent grownup....except Great Expectations. Boo to that.
I did that a couple of years ago with Moby Dick, and it was breathtaking.
...Central/South American writers on the shelves. I would love the excuse to read them...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the one everyone knows. And fair enough; he's terrific. One of my favorite writers / idea people in modern literature is Jorge Luis Borges. I wish more people discussed Julio Cortazar - Hopscotch is a fantastic piece of experimental fiction and A Certain Lucas was a feast of a book.
So there's three right there. Enjoy.
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Back when I was better at Spanish (when was studying) I read novellas and plays and essays by Cortazar, Unamuno, Jimenez and others...one that always stayed with me was Cortazar's "Axolotl".
Axolotl (http://www.cis.vt.edu/modernworld/d/axolotl.htm)
Edited to add that I got to read all this stuff in Spanish, and it was groovy.
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Back when I was better at Spanish (when was studying) I read novellas and plays and essays by Cortazar, Unamuno, Jimenez and others...one that always stayed with me was Cortazar's "Axolotl".
Axolotl (http://www.cis.vt.edu/modernworld/d/axolotl.htm)
What a beautiful piece. (I am saddened that one of my first reactions was that the narrator was incorrect about axolotls being larvae -- the gills are retained throughout the life of the animal -- but one can't help one's education.) Lovely and luminous. Are there longer works by this author?
I would also second the Borges. What little I've read of him I loved, and I'd love to read more.
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Nerdy, but insightful - maybe he had more in mind in using the term...from Dictionary.com...
Word History: The word larva referring to the newly hatched form of insects before they undergo metamorphosis comes from the Latin word lrva, meaning “evil spirit, demon, devil.” To understand why this should be so, first we need to know that the Latin word also was used for a terrifying mask, and in Medieval Latin it could mean “mask or visor.” Larva is therefore an appropriate term for that stage of an insect's life during which its final form is still hidden or masked, and New Latin lrva was thus applied in 1691 by Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who originated our system of classifying plants and animals. The word larva is first recorded in English in its scientific sense in 1768, although it had been used in its “spirit” sense in 1651 in a way that foreshadowed the usage by Linnaeus.
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What a beautiful piece. (I am saddened that one of my first reactions was that the narrator was incorrect about axolotls being larvae -- the gills are retained throughout the life of the animal -- but one can't help one's education.) Lovely and luminous. Are there longer works by this author?
Yep - all his short stories are worth checking out, and fairly readily available (we studied one such collection, the name of which escapes me at the moment, in a short stories class - so hell, check your friendly neighborhood campus bookstore). The titles I mentioned above are actual novels.
T DAWG if I had to guess, I'd say that he knew exactly what he was doing with that word. Well spotted.
Man, I am really wanting to go back and sink my teeth into these books again. It's been a while since I've really thought about them.
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Nice.
And yes, to go on a totally thread-derailing nerd-rant: the emphasis of the axolotls as a larval state is pretty interesting in that context. The idea of an adult axolotl as the larval stage for something bigger, stranger, more human... I can dig it. Very much.
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I'm also on board with the Borges, but I think it could present some practical difficulties. I mean, what are the chances that all of us could go into the infinite library and find the right room, the right shelf and the right volume all of which contained a reasonable approximation of Borges? What are the odds?
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Hee. I read the Borges Collected Fictions book last November... it took me three months to finish it. no, seriously.
I enjoyed a lot of the stories, but I must admit, I needed mood music and concentration to get into it.
The library one was one of the best :D
that + Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and The Aleph.
I liked all of those.
As for this book club idea..... I'm a rather slow reader lately and have a large queue, so I'm not sure if I'll join this time. I have joined forum book clubs before and enjoyed them, so perhaps sometime in the future. maybe I'll lurk.
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Last call, people! Last call for voting! I will declair a winner today in three hours. Vote your little hearts out people.
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I already voted early and often. But I can stuff some extra votes into the ballot box if you'd like.
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I already voted early and often. But I can stuff some extra votes into the ballot box if you'd like.
I'd rather stuff dollars into g-strings.
~Paul
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Oh, Jough, whatever happened to your little devil horns?
It's official, or as official as it can get with comments like the one above
1st place goes to J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, get your copies and start reading people! (as for me, I'll be reading it for the first time, and I got my copy for free cause my boss from when I worked at the used bookstore was going to throw it out due to the nibble marks through the cover and first few pages.)
And.... go!
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nibble marks through the cover and first few pages.
That good huh?
I shall go and look into it.
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Inside the cover?
"1978
Kathy Birs
Love
Your Mathu
888-6743"
So not just nibbled, but nibbled with love.
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You should have seen the nibbles on Kathy.
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Inside the cover?
"1978
Kathy Birs
Love
Your Mathu
888-6743"
So not just nibbled, but nibbled with love.
Stuff like this is why I love shopping used bookstores. There's that weird, mildly cool sensation that you're buying history right along with your book. Sometimes I'm tempted to write my name and a brief message ("I flung this book out into the ether; if you read it, let me know") in used books before selling/giving/sending them away.
Anyway, shall pick up Franny & Zooey stat.
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I am somewhat sad about this because there is no way in hell that I am going to read Franny and Zooey again at my advanced age. But I'm sure it will be interesting to lurk.
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Well, I tripped today and twisted my ankle, so I can't walk for god knows how long. I have my laptop at hand, along with a few books, but I don't have a copy of Franny et Zoey, nor do I have any Kudos bars. I'll try to get ahold of those in the next few days and in the next few minutes, respectively.
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when do we start talking about the book and where?
who took all the deviled eggs?
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I'm still waiting on my Amazon order!
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when do we start talking about the book and where?
who took all the deviled eggs?
Okay, okay. I'll make up a fresh batch of eggs for you. Just give me a minute. Here are some stale crackers to tide you over.
Also, lets start a new thread at the beginning of August to talk about the book. It's not fair to start chatting until we've given the injured and inane the time needed to purchase said book.
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so can we use this thread to talk about the inanities of hwo we actually got the book into our sweaty little hands?
because my library is a sad, sad place.
the librarian hadn't heard of the book, but she did know who Salinger is.
In fact, she was nice enough to look in the stacks for the book when the "computer" said it was not in the stacks, and then politely let me know that they do not have Catcher In the Rye anymore because someone stole it.
i considered donating a copy, but have since chose not to because she is a miserable asshole.
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Wow, librarians are awesome. I volunteered in a library while in highschool, and was totally amazed by the weird life of librarians. All I remember about the librarian I mostly worked with is that she was a book-protector-wrap-Nazi. She got really angry if even a quarter inch of excess wrap was wasted. Also, one of my friends (also volunteering) accidentally ripped opened a packet of salt into a book, and she was made to go through page by page with a special brush, as shaking the book off was aparently a big no-no.
Ark, does your library have inter-library loans? Maybe the can have the book shipped to you from some other library, or there's always Amazon.
St. Z, you know a thing or two about librarians I believe. Care to share with the group?
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I volunteered in a library while in highschool, and was totally amazed by the weird life of librarians. All I remember about the librarian I mostly worked with is that she was a book-protector-wrap-Nazi. She got really angry if even a quarter inch of excess wrap was wasted. Also, one of my friends (also volunteering) accidentally ripped opened a packet of salt into a book, and she was made to go through page by page with a special brush, as shaking the book off was aparently a big no-no.
You asked. This is going to be long - and I'm leaving shit out.
No lie, librarians are a pretty odd bunch. Not necessarily in a bad way, but to really Be in the Business, so to speak, you need to have the Library Science degree (I think the ratio of time / money spent on required qualifications versus salary for librarians is probably the worst in civilization, ever, except for the garbagemen in "Men at Work"), which means that most of the people you come across at libraries are exactly the sort of people who decided a long time ago that libraries are where they want to spend pretty much the majority of their waking lifespan. A lot of these people are kind of unhappy that way too many library patrons have been trained by our capitalist, customer-service culture to be selgiraffe and impatient and basically sort of infantile (I use the word "infantile" in its literal sense, i.e. babies go apeshit when their needs aren't met for a moment) shitheads about Getting What They Want. Tread accordingly.
I understand / can explain the book-protector-wrap-Nazism because, like so many specialty library supplies, the shit is expensive. (Freaking out over a quarter-inch is excessive, though, and sounds like someone is frustrated and indulging in a little bit of authoritarian release.) You would not believe how much seemingly ordinary stuff costs, probably because it's a small market.
As far as the salt incident - that spun me out for a second, because I've never seen one of those "special brushes"; perhaps because they cost $6K each and are made with materials from the Moon - you have to understand that we're expecting any given library book to be handled, literally, hundreds and hundreds of times. (Read cover-to-cover, no. But there is one hell of a lot of handling going on.) The expectation is that, too, ordinary people don't necessarily have the same reverence for Materials that we do - it sounds almost like an elitist opinion, really; I can hear y'all saying "I take extra special care of my library books!" because I'm sure that you do, but generally, people just don't give a shit about what happens to "free stuff".
So, yeah, she could have shaken the salt out of the book, but look - if one page goes missing from a book, we have to retire it. Them's the rules. And there's no guarantee that we'll replace the book, even if it's still in print; I wish I could tell you otherwise, but sometimes a book gets withdrawn due to damage and we look at the statistics and we look at the budget and if a fifty-dollar book only circulated five times in its, I don't know, three years in our collection, the reasoning is that it's not cost-effective to replace it. So there you go - that book is now unavailable to the community (and, in the inter-library loan sense, there is one less copy available to the world).
Don't fuck*ng get me started on people who steal books. I think it's nice, RKB, that you thought about donating a copy, but here's another sad fact - not every book that gets donated to the library gets added to the collection. I'm sorry that your librarian is a miserable asshole who put you off. Are you not allowed, in general, to browse the stacks for books solo? Because that is kind of insane.
Ark, does your library have inter-library loans? Maybe the can have the book shipped to you from some other library, or there's always Amazon.
For a book like Franny & Zooey, I wouldn't really recommend an ILL. It's a paperback and really fairly ubiquitous; you could probably pick it up in a used bookshop for the price of an ILL fee.
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It's only $5.99 at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316769495/joughcom). And they have used copies starting at $0.83.
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I think I paid only about 5 bucks at Barnes and Noble.
~Paul
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Zart: There's a fee for ILL in your neck of the woods? Crazy!
Anyhoo, no offence meant by my mocking the librarian I worked with (or librarians in general), but yes, she had a special book brush with a really long handle that hung on the wall above the little table where I worked.
She was the librarian of my high school library, which is a little different from working at a public library, and perhaps requires a higher level of being anal and scary, as teens do not like to shut the fuck up in general, nevermind in a place where you're supposed to be quiet.
Also, a super cool, funky guy I had a crush on was one of many librarians at the library near my house as a teen. (Also, as a side note, Zart you are a super cool funky guy who probably has one or two shy library partrons with crushes on you.) He worked with another librarian who was a certifiable nut job. Example of craziness: I am in line to check out books with my mom ahead of me and with several people ahead of us, the librarian is a lady in her late 30's and she is wearing a turtle neck with a print of cats all over it, and large earings of cats. It's finally my mom's turn and my mom says, jovially, "You must like cats!" The librarian is annoyed and replies "No, I don't like cats." My mom replies "Oh... because I thought with the shirt and the earings..." "They were gifts." Later when the cute boy librarian was hanging out with me, I asked him about the crazy librarian, and apparently she has five cats, and always wears clothes with cat motifs. And also, she regularly accused him of stealing her lunches, which he apparently did not do. It turned out me and the cute librarian had no chemistry, but we're still on friendly terms and cross paths every so often.
Also, since moving into my new house I've visited the local library only to find that it is not a "quiet" library. Granted it is about the same size as my living room. The librarians and all the patrons talk at full volume, which I find really weird. I mean, I have no reason to want them to be quiet, but I'm totally programmed to speak in a whisper at the library. You don't talk full volume at the library!
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Zart: There's a fee for ILL in your neck of the woods? Crazy!
It's a nominal fee, less than a goddamned video rental and, if you've ever mailed a book, much less mailed it twice, you'll know that it doesn't even begin to cover postage. I have it on good authority that the fee is really only in place to keep people from abusing the ILL system (oh yes they will).
She was the librarian of my high school library, which is a little different from working at a public library, and perhaps requires a higher level of being anal and scary, as teens do not like to shut the fuck up in general, nevermind in a place where you're supposed to be quiet.
What's sad is that it requires even more special schooling / certification if you want to be a School Librarian. I honestly cannot understand why anyone would do that to themselves, especially where fuckin' teenagers are concerned, apart from tapping a well of idealism and commitment deeper than any of us have any moral right to even imagine.
- cat & librarian story -
The very first entry of the Library Conference Drinking Game (http://www.keef.net/jill/index.php/jill/revised_library_conference_attendance_drinking_game/) is (drink if you see) "someone wearing something with cats on it (chug if it’s a tapestry cat print)". Cliches are funny because they're true, people. Many librarians are basically High School English Teacher Overdrive, with all the emotional baggage and general eccentricity that entails.
And Ash, I wish you were right - but ever since I moved into the library basement doing behind-the-scenes work, the fodder for stories has more or less dried up. And so have the secret-but-totally-obvious crushes. :(((((
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The very first entry of the Library Conference Drinking Game (http://www.keef.net/jill/index.php/jill/revised_library_conference_attendance_drinking_game/)
Dude, Keef used to post here before we either had to ban him or we made him leave purely out of SHAME.
It is strange to see that the internet is a pretty small fuck*ng place sometimes.
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I've never lived anywhere that charged for inter-library loans...
Here, it's free and statewide and they have to FLY the books here from neighbor islands and it's still free...
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Here you do get charged a dollar per book if you don't come pick up a book you've requested, but only if you don't show within like 10 days. So basically it's free if you're not a slacker.
I've actually just returned to the pleasures of the public library after years of visiting only the university library and/or buying books. After accumulating so many books that I'll never read more than once, and having to move with them, I've realized that I need to stop wasting money and shelf space.
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Ark, does your library have inter-library loans? Maybe the can have the book shipped to you from some other library, or there's always Amazon.
- my sister has her master's degree in the dewey decimal system.
- i got it at hastings when my sister wouldn't return my phone call in .01 nanoseconds when i was going to ask her to get it for me through her "contacts".
- the dour bitch "offered" to try and "check the system" to see if she could "try to get it" for me. i said "my sister's a librarian" and "i'd check with her". i also said "i hate hastings, they'll prolly have cathcer in the rye, and not frannie and zooie, the sign says "literature", it should say "we have a book!"".
she remained humorless.
- yes, hastings _did_ have the book. fuckers. (oops, sorry, fuck*rs).
- please be advised i do not believe the woman was dour, nor a bitch, as a result of her career choice.
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- i beleive i am allowed to walk the stacks. it is a very sad place, this library. it sweats unhappiness. i keep waiting to see "come to the local library friday nights for book burnings!" in hte "happenings" section of the local paper.
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The Barnes and Noble had Franny and Zooey and Catcher in the Rye in the Required Reading section of the Back to School table. That was surprising. I thought Catcher in the Rye was supposed to make kids go nuts and kill people. Catcher in the Rye and Marilyn Manson. I figured it'd be banned or something. Like Huckelberry Finn.
~Paul
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The Barnes and Noble had Franny and Zooey and Catcher in the Rye in the Required Reading section of the Back to School table. That was surprising. I thought Catcher in the Rye was supposed to make kids go nuts and kill people. Catcher in the Rye and Marilyn Manson. I figured it'd be banned or something. Like Huckelberry Finn.
It came in at #13 for the most challenged books (http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bbwlinks/100mostfrequently.htm) for 90-00. This stuff pisses me off so bad. Hell, I could challenge Narnia right now for innapropriate religious themes or any of 10 billion other books which "promote heterosexuality" but I have enough respect for the 1st Amendment (and innate human rights) not to.