2013: The First book. AKA That Book You Always Wanted To Read But Were Afraid To Ask Down From The Shelf

[Justin]

So. Pick a book that (is this what we said over vin chaud and small chocolates?) you've always wanted to read but for some reason haven't, or even a book that has intimidated you so much that you can't even look at its cover, such as the latest Jeffery Archer. Or just the next book on your list/shelf/stacked by your toilet. It must be fiction...

I'm proposing: Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot.

(If I have any of the details wrong, please feel free to point them out etc.)

[René]

Ok, this is a looooooong one but I know I won't be the only one with it on my 'difficult' shelf, and given the recent trend of coming to the club without having finished the book, it's a good candidate for sparking interesting conversation : Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace.

[René]

@Lindsay I've contacted my lawyers to find out if my goodreads book club moderator status allows me to effectively BAN someone from European territory. They'll be getting back to me shortly. You've been warned.

[Justin]

How long shall we have to suggest books? Just wondering if people want the book chosen to read over the Chrimbo holidays or not? There's no rush though...

[Grace]

I'm new to this group, and wasn't able to attend the last get-together, but I'd like to speak up in favor of Infinite Jest. I've read so much about it, and I decided the holidays would be a good time to have a go. It would definitely offer a lot to discuss, as there is an unfathomable side to it, indeed!

[Grace]

PS - The Marriage Plot is a good book, I'm not suggesting it because I've already read it so it doesn't meet the criteria. It's well worth reading, more "accessible" than the DFW, and also offers plenty of matters for discussion (I'd say more in terms of ideas perhaps than the story itself which is very straightforward).

[René]

@Justin the good readers shall speak for three days and three nights, at the end thereof a doodle you will put up the books herewith.

[Justin]

Okay, well we have three books then so far.
Grace, fair enough - do you have a suggestion too?
René: have you been reading that there Bible again?!

[Ganit]

I wanted to propose Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides...and than Justin already proposed another book of this writer.
But...I still propose this one :)
Have a great day...

[Alan]

I'm slightly torn between Pale Fire (Nabakov) or Wolf Hall (Mantel) but I'll plump for the Nabako.

My suggestion is, this, Pale Fire

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pale-Fire-Pen...

[Viviane]

Hello,

For me "the fifty..", no, sorry "the forty rules of love" by Elif Shafak :


"Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of Ella's life - an emptiness once filled by love.

So when Ella reads a manuscript about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and his forty rules of life and love, her world is turned upside down. She embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author of this work."


Have a good day !

Viviane

[Georgina]

Hi all !

First of all, thank you for your warm welcome to my very first meeting. I enjoyed it a lot !

My suggestion is "The Art of Joy" by Goliarda Sapienza

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Joy-Nov...

[Kiwi (Karin)]

Hi everyone,
just realized that I have not yet brought forward my suggestion: "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" by Ken Kesey.

Bises
Kiwi

[Justin]

This is looking good... how about people have another day to submit books and then we can vote from some time tomorrow (Thurs)?

[Justin]

The suggestions finish later today (Thursday) and then I can put up the doodle-whateveryoucallit. So, any more great books to add? Surely Ms E L James has some other great works out there...

[René]

You see, this is why democracy is such a failure. If the ancient Greeks had known their political invention would one day be used to gang up on unsuspecting book clubbers, they'd have thought twice about releasing it onto the world. I'm not saying they wouldn't have gone ahead finally, after having weighed all the arguments and run out of refreshments, I'm just saying they'd have thought twice about it.

[Justin]

The modern Greeks have spoken: http://www.thegreekbookstore.com/fish...

[René]

What? What is this strange and evil magic trick you have wrought? You have made the Greeks pronounce the name of the book-that-cannot-be-named!

[Ganit]

too bad they are out of stock because we could accomplish 2 things : help the Greek economy (as we discussed during the meeting) and satisfy Rene's suppressed wish...

[Frizzi]

Hey everybody,

I wish y'all a very happy Christmas and a great New Year 2013!

By the way: Where is the doodle ;) ?

Bisous

[Justin]

It's coming! I was just giving the likes of you, Frizzi, the chance to suggest a book!

[Justin]

Okay, the Doodle is up: www.doodle.com/z5d8ntnzcwxc9mqn
Please vote for 2 books and I guess the poll closes on Sunday night.

Here are the books that you nominated...
1) The Marriage Plot: www.goodreads.com/book/show/10964693-...
2) Infinite Jest: www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infi...
3) Fifty Shades Of Grey: www.goodreads.com/book/show/10818853-...
4) Middlesex: www.goodreads.com/book/show/2187.Midd...
5) Pale Fire: www.goodreads.com/book/show/7805.Pale...
6) The Forty Rules Of Love: www.goodreads.com/book/show/6642715-t...
7) The Art Of Joy: www.goodreads.com/book/show/16111021-...
8) One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest: www.goodreads.com/book/show/853494.On...

(Oh, and I'm not sure if we're voting for 50 Shades as the first book or the whole trilogy(!), but I'm sure we can cross that bridge when and if we come to it, although by then René may have destroyed every single copy of it on the planet, so it won't matter...)

Now, like good citizens, go vote!

[Alan]

Excellent selection! I'm delighted that it was so hard to choose this time, I can see myself going on and reading a load of these.

[Frizzi]

Justin, thanks for the organization. The likes of me are happy to have the likes of you with lots of inspiring book ideas. Looking forward to read the next book :)

[René]

Looks like a race between Infinite Jest and The Marriage Plot. I didn't vote for the MP because I've already read it (nya-nya). There's a passage in it in which one of the characters is walking on the Rue des Trois Bornes in the 18th, and it's an eye-opener for the American college kid from the 80's that he is, and I read it the day after having met some friends at a bar in the very same street and thinking, "what a dumpy-looking street."

[Justin]

I hope this isn't a subtle spoiler to get all MP voters to change allegiance! Who's left, Kiwi must vote, non? And Erin?

[Kiwi (Karin)]

Hello dears and greetings from North Yorkshire (a wee bit wet and windy I might add....),
I just concluded the doodle (I suppose) - so is the new book officially chosen?
Justin, when are you closing the vote?

Cheerily - and a very Merry Christmas to all of you!
Kiwi

[Ganit]

don't want to scare anyone...but you realize that the Infinite Jest is over thousand pages, right?
Just saying...and not changing my vote :)

[Justin]

Hello to North Yorkshire! This is suddenly all a little bit like Eurovision voiting! I can close it in a couple of hours?

I did know IJ is that long (I've already read half though) - you lot are bonkers! Not sure we'll meet in January will we, given its length?

[René]

Yep, over a thousand pages. It may even take Erin a whole week to read it!

Who's SB? Show thyself!

[Sanj]

me

[René]

Sanjeev! A founding member, no less! Well met, sir.

Justin, is the doodle closed? Do we have a winner?

[Justin]

The Doodle IS closed. We have a winner! It's the incredibly short-story-esque Infinite Jest by the late David Foster Wallace. Happy holiday reading, peeps, and I guess I have to sort some sort of date for the discussion... how long to read? 4 weeks? 6? EIGHT?

[Ezisbest]

Woo-hoo, I'm already 300 pages in. And I will definitely be there. Very excited (and slightly intimidated) to join you guys for the first time and discuss the book I've nervously shuffling around for so long! I'd say six weeks - in his introduction, Dave Eggers said at least a month.

[René]

I think mid-february would be good.

[Grace]

I'm excited too, it will also be my first meeting - baptism by fire? According to my Kindle, I've read 14%. Lets's not have the meeting too late in February - I have to travel out of town the last week of the month. I'm looking forward to meeting fellow readers! Meanwhile, happy holidays to all and best wishes for great books in the new year :-)

[Justin]

Happy New Year all!

Apologies for not arranging the date Doodle yet. Will sort today.

[Georgina]

happy new year to all !!! May it be full of marvellous literary discoveries !

I have not even started the book yet (actually haven't even got round to buying it)so it looks like I will be part of the "didn't finish" group at the next meeting !!

[Erin]

argh!! damn goodreads notifactions. I never get these!! And the result is that we are reading infinite jest, a book that I already tried to read and failed. at least I am already 100 pages in, even if it was 3 years ago that I read them. Looking forward to seeing you all in February to discuss (not discuss?) the book.

[Justin]

Erin, I blame René...

Okay, here is the Doodle. It's for all of Feb.
http://www.doodle.com/psusbvwmrmidisnm

[René]

What? What'd I do?

Hey, wouldn't it be really funny if I showed up, having proposed the book and all, and I hadn't even read it? Wouldn't that be funny?

[Justin]

If you're having trouble keeping track of people in IJ (I certainly am, having put the book down early last year and coming back to it now), there's a whole wiki devoted to it:

http://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/d...

[René]

Is it that all roads lead to DFW, or am I just noticing the ones that do? I set aside IJ for the evening and was reading an article at Slate.com about how to write a good memoir, and whaddya know the article cites the example of none other than DFW and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", a first-person account of a cruise vacation. Couldn't resist reading it. So here I am trying to avoid DFW and reading him all the same.

Here's a great quote:

"This is the occasion I first see the thirteen-year-old kid with the toupee. He’s slumped pre-adolescently in his chair with his feet up on some kind of rattan hamper while what I’ll bet is his mom talks at him nonstop; he is staring into whatever special distance people in areas of mass public stasis stare into."

I'm not saying I'd really prefer we were reading this book instead of Infinite Jest, which I thought was 1000 pages long but was actually 1000+ pages long, which means over 1000 and is really closer to 1500, though that number reflects the actual text and the footnotes combined, these footnotes being a reader's preference as to whether he or she reads them or not. Without the footnotes the text comes out to about 1300 pages.

But what is a page, exactly? On an ebook reader, if you were to read the electronic version of the book, which I am, a page represents a certain fixed number of characters, and only indirectly reflects the actual length of text you would read in a physically printed out version of the text. If you think this is a basic, sound metric, you are wrong. Characters themselves are not mere symbolic stand-ins for the printed character either. In computer terms, a character can be taken from any one of a good number of encodings, of which US-ASCII is but the first one that was popularized to numerically represent text, but was lacking most foreign accented characters (present in latin1, or iso-8859-1 if you prefer, iso-8859-2 being a revised version that includes the euro sign) and none of the chinese characters of japanese kanji, for which the UTF-8 encoding was introduced.

[Justin]

I see what you're saying.

I'm stuck in huge a footnote side story. And my hopes of reading about 30 pages a day have gone out of the window.

[Justin]

Thinking I'll close the date Doodle Sunday night?

[Ganit]

yes! you surely gave enough time for everyone to express themselves :)

[Emilie]

just bought the book on my kindle, will start reading it today! Even though I usually work on evenings I would love to finally got to join you! I am shy it will be good to me to cross the path!

[Ganit]

Just got the book ... Only 981 pages in my copy ! Yey :)

[Justin]

Okay, so the date for discussing how much of IJ you couldn't finish is... THURSDAY 28 FEB - a date that everybody who voted can make!

Will sort some venue nearer the date.

[Alan]

Didn't see a poll but very happy with that! According to my kindle I'm already a mammoth 2% in. Easy!