Hi everyone,
In case we all forgot, we were supposed to read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead for July 20th, or 7 weeks from when we agreed to. There is a partial discussion of the book here. If anyone is interested in discussing it further, we can either use this thread or make a new one.
thenewgreen asked if I would be willing to run #hubskibookclub and if no one objects, I'd be happy to step in. I think that it's a worthwhile idea, especially as books naturally come up in our discussions and it's a good way to check out some of them as well as any others people think would be worth discussing.
While I am willing to run #hubskibookclub, I also wonder if anyone would be interested in a rotating leadership role. For example, let's say that this time around, I'm running it and so I'm responsible for choosing a book and reminding people of when we've agreed to discuss it and then encouraging discussion. Then, next time around people can suggest books to read and whoever's suggestion is chosen, will then lead the next round of discussion. Again, this way would require active participants, but I think in the end it would ultimately be the most fair and could lead us into some interesting territory.
Please let me know what you think!
Shoutouts to:
StJohn, DiamondLou86, AnSionnachRua, _refugee_, minimum_wage, flagamuffin, fuffle, b_b, hugitout, JakobVirgil, zebra2, AdSeriatim, mk, thenewgreen, SufficientGrace, ecib, kleinbl00, cliffelam, hootsbox, lil, rezzeJ, cgod, blackbootz, onehunna, AshShields, BLOB_CASTLE, insomniasexx, kuli, cowboyhaze, seatraveler, Floatbox, maynard, hiss
I know some people have read Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting but I haven't and I'd love to read more Kundera. Please leave suggestions for books to read below!
* Also, these discussions might be a good way to link to and explore themes in our own work and thus gain a little exposure, something which people are discussing here.
Edit 8/1: If anyone would like to be on the shoutout list for #hubskibookclub please let me know and I'll add you.
I hope that I will continued to be tagged/see these posts because I do enjoy the discussions a lot, even if I have only read a fraction of the book. My schedule is so busy I don't want to take on any responsibility that I won't have time/energy to fulfill. If you have the time and willingness, humanodon, do it. Keep this shit going. At some point we'll all read the book and have a hearty discussion.
I'm throwing in my vote for 2666 suggested by flagamuffin. Additionally, since I'm in the middle of it and love it, I'll throw in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. It's beautifully written and extremely unique. Incredibly beautiful as well, and always interested to discussed considering the fatwa it caused. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses Additionally, you can throw my name in the hat for rotating leadership.
Hey! I'll do the next one after this if you like, or we can rotate various people, or you can do them all if you so please. Didn't read Atlas Shrugged again because it's a bit of a slog and I was abroad but I'm headed Stateside soon so I'll be participating. I've been meaning to read Bolano's 2666, reread Catch-22, and maybe start in on some early 20th century British stuff (Waugh?) so I'd love it if we read any of those.
Cool! We'll get a feel for how this can best work out in a day or two. For the sake of others taking a peek at things on the table, it might be useful if you could provide a link to a brief description of your suggestions (like a wikipedia page for example).
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller -- one of the most famous American books ever written, I think. Very post-modern, satirical take on some US soldiers in World War II. 2666 by Roberto Bolano -- this book is a bit of a trip. In five parts, it jumps from place to place, time to time, story to story. I don't know much more having not read it, but I do know that it's extremely -- almost bizarrely -- well-regarded among literary critics. EDIT: I just thought I'd mention that as I was typing that post I had a moment of realization about how much I love hubski. Constant intellectual stimulation and friendly conversation.
Great, thanks for providing links! I love the conversation and the flow of ideas here too. It seems like it's what keeps the active members active and I hope that these interactive aspects that we're building for ourselves like #hubskibookclub, #weeklymusicthread and #todayswritingprompt reinforce that and help the community draw in other people who are active and interested in a lot of different things.
Oh! Oh! Does anyone want to read The Screwtape Letters with me? One of my favorite books ever and possibly the finest satire ever written. A couple of demons send letters back and forth attempting to seduce an anonymous person into sin and damnation.
I've never read any Cormac McCarthy, I think it's time I did.
Religion for Atheists
The Good Soldier Svejk
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Along those lines, I would highly suggest the book The River of Doubt by Candice Millard. Shout-out to mpoe who is the founder of the New Books Network. Marshall, anything you might suggest to the Hubski crew that was amazing of late?
Morvern Callar
Hi, I'd like to join. I'd also like to re-read Alasdair Gray's "Lanark: A Life in Four Books".
Boss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_RoykoMany columns are collected in books; yet, his most famous book remains his unauthorized biography of Richard J. Daley, Boss, a best-selling non-fiction portrait of the first Mayor Richard Daley, and the City of Chicago under his mayoralty.
Invisible Cities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_CitiesThe book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 cities, apparently narrated by Polo. Short dialogues between the two characters are interspersed every five to ten cities and are used to discuss various ideas presented by the cities on a wide range of topics including linguistics and human nature. The book is structured around an interlocking pattern of numbered sections, while the length of each section's title graphically outlines a continuously oscillating sine wave, or perhaps a city skyline. The interludes between Khan and Polo are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device, a story within a story, that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories.
Wittgenstein's Mistress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_MistressWittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson is a highly stylized, experimental novel in the tradition of Samuel Beckett. The novel is mainly a series of statements made in the first person; the protagonist is a woman who believes herself to be the last human on earth. Though her statements shift quickly from topic to topic, the topics often recur, and often refer to Western cultural icons, ranging from Zeno to Beethoven to Willem de Kooning. Readers familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus will recognize stylistic similarities to that work.
Though Markson's original manuscript was rejected fifty-five times, the book, when finally published in 1988 by Dalkey Archive Press, met with critical acclaim. In particular, the New York Times Book Review praised it for "address[ing] formidable philosophic questions with tremendous wit." A decade later, David Foster Wallace described it as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country" in an article for Salon entitled "Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels >1960."[1]
Terra Nostra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nostra_(novel) Could be a good read after Kundera, as he provides the afterword.Terra Nostra, perhaps Fuentes' most ambitious novel, is a "massive, Byzantine work" that tells the story of all Hispanic civilization.[1] Modeled on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Terra Nostra shifts unpredictably between the sixteenth century and the twentieth, seeking the roots of contemporary Latin American society in the struggle between the conquistadors and indigenous Americans. Like Artemio Cruz, the novel also draws heavily on cinematic techniques.[1]