Books

[Jemble Fred]

Our town library in Aber is ... well, to put it nicely, rather small.  Hopefully my shelves of books should be able to help me out, though.  All I have to do is bribe the right people when it comes to picking which books we're going to read.

I never got round to renting their I, Claudius VHS collection. Does the place still smell like a swimming pool?

[Tom Rad]

So, as for the bookclub idea proper, is everyone agreed to my vague suggestions above. If so, I'll start a thread later on today.

Yes, that sounds great! I'll be joining in as well.

[Kingboy_D]

I've just read Ubik by P.K Dick. It throws you in at the deep end at first but you soon get to grip with the superficially pulp sci-fi settings (precogs, psychics and spaceships). Just when you think you know whats going on your entire understanding of it changes (along with the principal characters entire perception of reality). And just when you think you've finally worked it out, there's a twist at the end that totally shatters everything you thought you knew. Whole thing reads like a movie, fantastic stuff.

Am almost finished Jem: The Making of Utopia as well, which is about humans colonising some far off world called Jem and squabbling over its resources and abusing its natives. Not exactly original subject matter but its more commentary on human nature, as all good sci-fi is.

[Gamma Ray]

Found a great site the other day, which has interviews with most the great authors of the last 50 years. Of all the writers that have floated my proverbial boat, only Ken Kesey is missing from this archive, that and the obvious ones like Salinger and that guy who wrote Gravity's Rainbow.

it was www.wiredforbooks.org/swaim/

I downloaded those a while ago, but I haven't listened to them yet. I agree about Kesey - I have just finished 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' and it is one of the most lucid and beautifully crafted books that I have ever read. I'd love to hear Kesey explain just why he quit writing, because he was eminently very capable ... From what I remember it was because he figured that he could achieve what he wanted in other ways, reaching more people. When I was on the pro-peace marches last year I was minded of Kesey, and his attitude to the anti-Vietnam war rallies years ago in the US (as detailed in Tom Wolfe's excellent 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'), where he criticized people for playing the government's game instead of getting creative. I think that he had a point, and I think that a lot of the posters here who express similar pro-peace sentiments should learn a little more about the man. One day, when I have the time and am minded to, I'll post a thread about the beats. They were an interesting collection of people, and I haven't found it so easy to identify their heirs ...

Fiction only, or are we going to allow poetry, non-fiction etc.?

I think it should be fiction only. Easier that way.

I don't have it in front of me now, but I'm minded by that of the original dust jacket copy for 'Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas' by good ol' Hunter S. Thompson. I'm not sure that it ever actually got published with the book itself (It's part of the 'Great Shark Hunt' anthology), which is a shame. It is one of the rare instances where Thompson actually explains what he was doing/trying to do, which was make journalism truer. Not necessarily more factual, but definitely as close to the bone as possible. One of his points was that the distinction between fiction and journalism is an artificial one (well, the best journalism and the best fiction), and that's a point that I have a lot of time for. Some of my favourite books (written by folk like Robert Maynard Pirsig or Thompson himself) can be difficult to track down in bookshops, because the stockists aren't sure how to classify them ...

So I think that anything should go, so long as it gets you to thinking ...

[Almost Yearly]

I'm reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

Me too. Love the writing, but am not yet as blown away by Mr Patel as the girl who lent it to me was. Is it chick lit, d'you think? Is chick lit just chocolate in Afrikaans?

Don't think I'll have time for the VW Book Club. Shame. Nice idea butnut. You can still hit me though if you like.

[Uncle_Z]

The first rule of Book Club is that you do not talk about Book Club.  

Would like to participate but at the moment I am having a reading crisis:   I have noticed that I have only read about 30% of the books I have bought, some of which I really really want to break the spine of (eg. Moby Dick.  How can a 29yr old have never read Moby Dick?  Jeez).

Currently on Post Office - Bukowski and loving that (Big up to my man Pilf)

I suppose I could keep an eye on the threads and join in if the featured book coincides with one on my shelf.

But anyway, the point...

Would be interesting to have a fortnightly IRC session.  Realtime-ish discussion rather than thread based.

[Bogey]

The second rule of Book Club is, no smoking.


sorry.

[Hornet]

I would like to make a case for Any Human Heart by William Boyd.  For those that don't know it, it's written in the style of a journal and charts a life of seeming privilege but ends up making you, the reader, question your own life and achievements.  I found it quite profound and to coin a phrase "unputdownable"

[Cerys]

Our town library in Aber is ... well, to put it nicely, rather small.  Hopefully my shelves of books should be able to help me out, though.  All I have to do is bribe the right people when it comes to picking which books we're going to read.

I never got round to renting their I, Claudius VHS collection. Does the place still smell like a swimming pool?

Quite possibly - I haven't been in for a while.  The problem with the old swimming pool smell was that it always made me crave chips.