book of the month

[lovejuice]

so i'm thinking about doing this. who's interested? for each month one of us picks a book for the rest to read. if you already read it, feel free to drop in with the discussion. unlike book swap, by having many people read one book, it should be read by at least one person. what do you think? any suggestion?

2007

december: a canticle for lebowitz (d davis)

2008

january: the melancholy of resistance (qrazy)
february: a death in the family (kurosawa fan)
march: sharp teeth (megladon)
april: manhunt: the 12-day chase for lincoln's killer (benny profane)
may: a happy death (lovejuice)
june: the life and opinions of tristram shandy, gentleman (dreamdead)
july: (melville)

[Qrazy]

I'm up for it and I vote we do... The Melancholy of Resistance by Krasznahorkai. It's what Werckmeister Harmonies was based on and it's supposed to be terrific.

[Kurosawa Fan]

I can't say I'd participate each time, but if a title interests me I'll definitely pick it up that month. Having a large group conversation would be great.

[ledfloyd]

if my library has the books i'll read em.

[lovejuice]

I'm up for it and I vote we do... The Melancholy of Resistance by Krasznahorkai. It's what Werckmeister Harmonies was based on and it's supposed to be terrific.

sound nice. how's about we have that for january? (this month is D's leibowitz)

[Qrazy]

Aight.

[megladon8]

I'm definitely in.

[lovejuice]

i will do may, and we want someone to cover june and july. preferably none that has yet volunteered so far.

[dreamdead]

I'll volunteer, though you should be forewarned that I'll be taking an 18th century English fiction class in the fall and will likely select one of the readings from that class to read. So I hope someone wants to read Frankenstein or Tristram Shandy...

[lovejuice]

I'll volunteer, though you should be forewarned that I'll be taking an 18th century English fiction class in the fall and will likely select one of the readings from that class to read. So I hope someone wants to read Frankenstein or Tristram Shandy...

i always want to read tristan shandy.

[Qrazy]

Yeah I've always wanted to read Tristam Shandy too...

Lovejuice you should update this thread at the top with all of the books of the months you've done so far and a rating and/or a few words... so when I finally catch up I'll know where I should start.

[ledfloyd]

tristram shandy is one of those books i picked up and never finished.

[Melville]

Tristram Shandy is better than Jesus.

[Qrazy]

Tristram Shandy is better than Jesus.

What about the autobiography of Jesus though, is it better than that?

[megladon8]

Anyone interested in getting this going again?

I saw two books today at Chapters that I thought could be great material for a book of the month thing here...

A family drama with stinging turns of dark comedy, the latest from Udall (The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint) is a superb performance and as comic as it is sublimely catastrophic. Golden Richards is a polygamist Mormon with four wives, 28 children, a struggling construction business, and a few secrets. He tells his wives that the brothel he's building in Nevada is actually a senior center, and, more importantly, keeps hidden his burning infatuation with a woman he sees near the job site. Golden, perpetually on edge, has become increasingly isolated from his massive family—given the size of his brood, his solitude is heartbreaking—since the death of one of his children. Meanwhile, his newest and youngest wife, Trish, is wondering if there is more to life than the polygamist lifestyle, and one of his sons, Rusty, after getting the shaft on his birthday, hatches a revenge plot that will have dire consequences. With their world falling apart, will the family find a way to stay together?

Dewitt's bang-up second novel (after Ablutions) is a quirky and stylish revisionist western. When a frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, the brothers journey from Oregon to San Francisco, and eventually to Warm's claim in the Sierra foothills, running into a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers. Eli's deadpan narration is at times strangely funny (as when he discovers dental hygiene, thanks to a frontier dentist dispensing free samples of "tooth powder that produced a minty foam") but maintains the power to stir heartbreak, as with Eli's infatuation with a consumptive hotel bookkeeper. As more of the brothers' story is teased out, Charlie and Eli explore the human implications of many of the clichés of the old west and come off looking less and less like killers and more like traumatized young men.

[Marley]

I wonder if the show Big Love was loosely based on the novel "The Lonely Polygamist" since the basic premise sounds familiar.

I'd be down for participating in this book of the month event.