Author Topic: March Book Club Options  (Read 7559 times)

worm@work

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March Book Club Options
« on: February 24, 2009, 01:59:45 PM »
I loved the way pix did this last time, so I'm going to do it pretty much the same way. I'll be posting six options for all of us to choose from and decide on the next selection for the book club. I'll keep the thread locked till I finish posting all the choices and then open it back up for discussion.



Option 1:


The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever, 1978
704 pages

Links: Amazon / Powell's

w@w: I have some egregious gaps when it comes to American authors and this is one that I really want to fix. I first encountered John Cheever through the PRI: Selected Shorts podcast where someone read out The Trouble with Marcie Flint. The story was just so impeccably crafted that I found myself comparing him to Chekhov. The fact that it won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award is probably worth mentioning as well.
Finally, it's a big book with a ton of stories. But I like the idea of having a collection of short stories in the mix. It makes discussion a bit more complicated but gives us the chance to pick and choose and only read parts and make it less important to read it in one stretch which I thought would be a good thing.

Excerpt from T.C. Boyle talking about John Cheever on All Things Considered
"There is a great, questing soul alive everywhere in these stories, a soul trying to come to grips with the parameters of human experience amid the ravishing beauty of nature. Few prose writers can touch Cheever for the painterly precision of his descriptions, and the reward of them too -- his characters, locked in the struggles of suburban and familial angst, regularly experience moments of transcendence and rebirth in nature.

My recommendation? Read the entire book through, the stories unfolding in chronological order, and you will feel the deep calm of immersion in Cheever's universe, even as you see the world of his society, our society, unfolding in all its fads and obsessions from the end of World War II through the late 1970s."

Opening Lines:
"We are a family that has always been very close in spirit. Our father was drowned in a sailing accident when we were young, and our mother has always stressed the fact that our familial relationships have a kind of permanence that we will never meet with again."

Semi-Random Excerpt
"Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. "

I love the idea of a radio with a malevolent green light :).



 
« Last Edit: February 24, 2009, 05:09:05 PM by worm@work »

worm@work

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Re: March Book Club Options
« Reply #1 on: February 24, 2009, 02:01:30 PM »
Option 2:


The Man Within
Graham Greene, 1929
224 pages

Links: Amazon / Powell’s

w@w: One of the few Graham Greene books I still haven’t gotten around to reading. I am curious to see what his writing was like when he was just 21 years old. Curious to see if I can detect the seeds of what came after in this first novel. According to a friend I trust, this is too melodramatic and is definitely his weakest book but I am eager to read it nevertheless. Just to get into the head of a 21-year old Graham Greene.

Author’s Note:
The Man Within was the first novel of mine to find a publisher. I had already written two novels, both of which I am thankful to Heinemann’s for rejecting. I began this novel in 1926, when I was not quite twenty-two, and it was published with inexplicable success in 1929, so it has now reached the age of its author. The other day I tried to revise it for this edition, but when I had finished my sad and hopeless task, the story remained just as embarrassingly romantic, the style as derivative, and I had eliminated perhaps the only quality it possessed – its youth. So in reprinting not a comma has been altered intentionally. Why reprint then? I can offer no real excuse, but perhaps an author may be allowed one sentimental gesture towards his own past, the period of ambition and hope.

First Lines:
He came over the top of the down as the last light failed and could almost have cried with relief at the sight of the wood below. He longed to fling himself down on the short stubby grass and stare at it, the dark comforting shadow which he had hardly hoped to see.

Semi-Random Excerpt
“She stepped down into the room and Andrews watched with fascinated eyes the swing of her gait, the manner in which she flung her chin up as she moved. ‘Oh, yes, I can see that,’ she said with a slight smile. ‘Here, give me that cup. You’ll break it.’
Andrews put his hand with sudden resolution behind his back. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want this cup. This was the cup we both drank from.’
‘That’s not the one,’ Elizabeth answered quickly, and as Andrews gazed at her in astonishment, she twisted her lower lip between her teeth. ‘I remember that one,’ she added, ‘because it had a chip out of the rim. Tell me – what are you doing here?’

Hmmm, the random excerpt doesn’t do much for me but I like the fact that it sort of feels like a movie.
« Last Edit: February 24, 2009, 04:33:17 PM by worm@work »

worm@work

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Re: March Book Club Options
« Reply #2 on: February 24, 2009, 03:42:54 PM »
Option 3:


A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul, 1961
576 pages

Links: Amazon / Powell’s

w@w: I really wanted to have a South Asian author on the list mostly because I read a lot of books by South Asian writers and would like to bring some of them to other people’s attention. I love Naipaul’s style and have inexplicably resisted reading what is considered his best book. He has this quiet sense of humor that really appeals to me and I find that he is able to make his characters human and flawed while still keeping them real and sympathetic.

Naipaul’s Own Words on the book
“Of all my books A House for Mr. Biswas is the one closest to me. It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child. It also contains, I believe, some of my funniest writing. I began as a comic writer and still consider myself one. In middle age now, I have no higher literary ambition than to write a piece of comedy that might complement or match this early book.”

First Lines
“Shortly before he was born there had been another quarrel between Mr Biswas’s mother Bipti and his father Raghu, and Bipti had taken her three children and walked all the way in the hot sun to the village where her mother Bissoondaye lived. There Bipti had cried and told the story of Raghu’s miserliness: how he kept a check on every cent he gave her, counted every biscuit in the tin, and how he would walk ten miles rather than pay a cart a penny.”

Semi-Random Excerpt
“But bigger than them all was the house, his house. How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one bad been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.”

I think this is the one I am most excited about.
« Last Edit: February 24, 2009, 04:33:30 PM by worm@work »

worm@work

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Re: March Book Club Options
« Reply #3 on: February 24, 2009, 04:08:02 PM »
Option 4:


The Moviegoer
Walker Percy, 1961
256 Pages

Links: Amazon / Powell’s

w@w: This one has not just been on my bookshelf but on my nightstand for ages and I still haven't cracked it open. It's got such a great title and the whole idea of man with no sense of purpose who watches double features all the time is right up my alley! Plus, like I said earlier, I love first novels.

Another one that I'm personally excited to read but suspect several people may have read already.

Time Magazine Blurb from the Backcover
“Clothed in originality, intelligence, and a fierce regard for man’s fate…. Percy has a rare talent for making his people look and sound as though they were being seen and heard for the first time by anyone.”

First Lines
“This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch. I know what this means. Since I go there every Sunday for dinner and today is Wednesday, it can only mean one thing: she wants to have one of her serious talks.

Semi-Random Excerpt:
“Toward her I keep a Gregory Peckish sort of distance. I am a tall black-headed fellow and I know as well as he how to keep to myself, make my eyes fine and my cheeks spare, tuck my lip and say a word or two with a nod or two.”
« Last Edit: February 24, 2009, 04:33:40 PM by worm@work »

worm@work

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Re: March Book Club Options
« Reply #4 on: February 24, 2009, 04:34:32 PM »
Option 5:


The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford, 1915
Links: Amazon / Powell’s

w@w: I haven’t read anything by Ford Madox Ford despite the fact that several friends I trust have recommended him to me. Something tells me he doesn’t get the attention he probably deserves and if that isn’t the case, then I’d like to find that out for myself. Plus, someone on the interwebs described The Good Soldier as a Kazuo Ishiguro book written by James Joyce and that just sounds scary good. 
Oh, and I do like the first line a lot too.

Excerpt from a New York Times Article:
The story proper involves ''four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks.'' Ford uses flashbacks and flashforwards to bring an extraordinary texture, a sense of foreboding and surprise, to his story. A similar technique was later used by such film directors as Alain Resnais (''Last Year at Marienbad'').

First Lines:
“This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy – or, rather, with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand.”

Random Excerpt:
“With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer characteristic gesture--all these things, and it is these things that cause to arise the passion of love--all these things are like so many objects on the horizon of the landscape that tempt a man to walk beyond the horizon, to explore. He wants to get, as it were, behind those eyebrows with the peculiar turn, as if he desired to see the world with the eyes that they overshadow. He wants to hear that voice applying itself to every possible proposition, to every possible topic; he wants to see those characteristic gestures against every possible background. Of the question of the sex-instinct I know very little and I do not think that it counts for very much in a really great passion. It can be aroused by such nothings--by an untied shoelace, by a glance of the eye in passing-- that I think it might be left out of the calculation.”

w00t! I love that excerpt and it just goes on like that for a while.... phew!

worm@work

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Re: March Book Club Options
« Reply #5 on: February 24, 2009, 05:08:19 PM »
Option 6:


Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Roddy Doyle, 1993
288 pages

Links: Amazon / Powell’s

w@w: For some reason I resisted reading this book when it first came out, perhaps because it had such positive reviews and everyone was raving about it . Then I read a story by Roddy Doyle in the New Yorker and liked it so much that I went and bought the book immediately. Then, stuff happened and it joined the big pile of books waiting to be read. Someone compared it to The 400 Blows which sounds like crazy talk but I do like books with kids as protagonists and this one sounds like it’s set in a time and place that is inherently interesting (and violent!). I also really liked the Oscar-Nominated live action short, New Boy and the fact that it’s based on a Roddy Doyle story makes me even more interested in reading this.

First Lines:
We were coming down our road. Kevin stopped at a gate and bashed it with his stick. It was Missis Quigley’s gate; she was always looking out the window but she never did anything.”

Semi-Random Excerpt:
“I didn’t like the idea of sitting down in the absolute dark but I did it, the two of us. We made sure we were touching, right beside each other. I could see Kevin’s shape, his head moving. I could see him stretching his legs. I was happy. I could have gone asleep. I was afraid to whisper, to ruin it. We could hear the others shouting, miles away.”

worm@work

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Re: March Book Club Options
« Reply #6 on: February 24, 2009, 05:10:26 PM »
Okay, all done! It'll be great if everyone can rank all the choices so that we can agree on something that everyone is likely to read along.
Thanks everyone :).
« Last Edit: February 24, 2009, 05:13:22 PM by worm@work »

FroHam X

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Re: March Book Club Options
« Reply #7 on: February 24, 2009, 05:14:27 PM »
I havent looked through the list properly. But I do have the Moviegoer on my shelf waiting to be read, so id be in support of that.
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ses

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Re: March Book Club Options
« Reply #8 on: February 24, 2009, 05:21:09 PM »
The semi-random excerpt from The Moviegoer has me a bit interested.
"It's a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart"

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smirnoff

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Re: March Book Club Options
« Reply #9 on: February 24, 2009, 06:32:34 PM »
The Good Soldier popped out a me. If not that then I think I'd favour The Moviegoer as well.

 

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