The BURIED Book Club discussion
Rules and Regulations and Expectations and Suggestations
And thanks for the patience, Y'ALL, in sorting through organization, calculating delineations, deciding what's been thoroughly BURIED and what's been just sitting there off to the side or still just too young for such a crusty project. My VISION for this group is itself a Work-in-Progrezz for which your contributions are invaluable. Shall I make only one small request that more links get made? if only because these books/authors mostly count as needles in haystacks and spelling can be a wreck on goodreads (whose search function sucks) when it comes to the unknowns; and also a little more SELF-promotion of your REVIEWS and Friends' REVIEWS.
We like STORIES. Tell us how YOU stumbled upon this BOOK whose deckle edge was dusty and moldy, already half encased in mud; how you first heard the author's VOICE which sounded through the coffin boards THEY thought would hold her/him silent unto the AGES. How did you find this thing?
sugGESTATion MnM1) When adding bOOks or authors, use the "add book/author" feature. THIs will autoMAGICally add a link back to tHIS groUP where those wHO clicK on aFORementioned links wiLL arrIve here for FURther inspiRATion.
Jim wrote: "MnM1) When adding bOOks or authors, use the "add book/author" feature. "One of the internetz' self-replication functions which we can contort into a shovel.
Coorelate -- ###booklinks :: ###bookssold
[if goodreads can do it with teenie-bopper lit, we can do it on behalf of sacRED BURIED books]
What happened to my entry on Tom Mallin, Nathan?
Declan wrote: "What happened to my entry on Tom Mallin, Nathan?"It's there. Look closer
Declan wrote: "What happened to my entry on Tom Mallin, Nathan?"http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
under Authors from K-P folder
Oh dear! Thanks Jim. Well I have just got up (pre-coffee-still-half-awake-syndrome) and I thought it was an alphabetical listing.(Don't tell me it is?)
Thanks Megha. I should just go back to bed and start all over again.
Declan wrote: "Thanks Megha. I should just go back to bed and start all over again."Declan. Take two. Aaaand, Action!
By now I'm guessing you discovered that only the 10 most recent discussions show for each folder and that you must open the folder to see the hidden discussions. But really, before coffee, why should you remember such a thing??!
Happy Friday!
N-O-P : BURIED books and their correlatively BURIED authors require ADVOCATES and CHAMPIONS. ThereFORe, we are not interested in compiling a list of seldom rated books simpliciter, but rather much more, books which YOU give a damn about. And that DAMN may be the minimal "I've just gotta know more." You may not know much, but know only enough that you know you need to know more. When starting a THREAD (Ariadne's, even) the assumption which shall rule the DAY (sans rue) is that YOU shall play point in bringing forth the SINNED AGAINST. [thusly has been the practice and the precedent and thusly shall we sally-forth, spade in hand]
A WORD on self-promotion AS it concerns Readers and Reviewers (i.e., YOU YOU AND YOU). Which is to say, don't FEAR it. I'll only slap you and dash you if you are an author primping yer book in these here parts. BUT if you are ExHUMing and conSUMing, please notify us in the self-nominate thread. AND when you've eaten the entire BOOKful, write a reVIEW and link it everywhere, everywhere, everywhere :: in our luxuriously furnished AUTHOR threads, in the ARChive of unBURIED reViEws, and everywhere and anywhere you ever find reason to drop the name of your BURIED author/book because LINKS ARE LIFE for these corpsus's. And your REVIEW of these rotten corpses will always serve the dead more than the living, so no need for you, Most Revered and Honourable Reader, to humble yourself. Make yer reREviews VisiBLE and you Shall be reWARded with LikesLikesLikes, the WATER OF LIFELIFELIFE.
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "We like STORIES. Tell us how YOU stumbled upon this BOOK whose deckle edge was dusty and moldy, already half encased in mud; how you first heard the author's VOICE which sounded through the coffin..."A related post to this idea– Books are some times hard to get for various reasons and Buried Books,even more so.
Therefore,my humble request to all the BBC members– kindly circulate ebooks ( barring those already easily available in the public domain) amongst group members – we want more readers & more reviews. If ppl are not reading these buried folks,chances are more cause they don't have access to them & not from lack of interest.
WHO'd ever thunk there'd be more RULES????Maybe not a NEW rule, but a SUGgestion of sorts; MAKES my LIFE (I'M not BURIED) easier::
Q1. WHEREAS we are advocating our books and SPEAKING for those withOUT voice, AND FURTHERMORE (add a few more WHEREAS's) dot dot dot PLEASE to expect to see when I consider certification that YOU dearest reader have ADD'd our author-in-question already to your TO-READ because if you've not whose to say YER advocating this BOOK, this AUTHOR. EXPLANANDUM :: In my offices of ModeratOR and CertifiOR, I wood like to see YOU having ADD'd what you are Advocating in our CLUB, when ADDing to our CLUB.
SUGGESTION:If a book you're after is out of print and online copies have inflationized to confiscatory price-levels, here is a handy tool to find out if any lending institutions near you have the book:
http://www.worldcat.org/
You may search by author, title, or ISBN, and when you do you can enter your city or postal code and get a list of libraries worldwide that currently carry the item, beginning with those nearest you, usually with a handy link to the libraries so you can check out their policies. If you can't borrow and it is short enough and rare enough and out of print, I encourage you to zoom to that institution, find the book, and stress its spine on the Xerox machine.
As an added bonus, you don't have to register to do this, although creating an account allows you to bookmark and archive etc.
Btw you may notice that WorldCat also lifts reviews from Goodreads, but does so in a way that, as far as I can tell, is content-neutral and unrelated to helpfulness or quality.
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Work-in-Progress RULEZ!!I have loads of rules and regulations. WHY not? This Club is designed to serve MY purposes. I want to find more books, a very peculiar set of books, more books than I'll have time to read or fundaments to afford.
A) You will find more than a whiff of SNOB and pretense and ELITEism here, of course, it's the nature of the BEAST.."
Ooh, I want to be a snob too! Is that part of the RULEZ?
But on second thought, I'd rather have my freedom, ha ha. :P
I'm really bad in that I only invest my time in reasonably well-known books... (except when they're not novels or fit into one of my niches).
Don't feel bad, Declan, I did the same thing and I was midway through a double cappuccino so there was no excuse. I overlooked that wee line "Showing 1-30 results of 35" or whatever. Easy to do.
Traveller wrote: "Ooh, I want to be a snob too! Is that part of the RULEZ? But on second thought, I'd rather have my freedom, ha ha. :P"Sorry ; can't be a SNOB without RULEZ. Or have things like BURIED Book Clubs ; or play baseball or futball ;; without rules we can't have language. Also without rules we'd have to submit to the tyranny of the mediocre and the pop=u=l'aire.
only invest my time in reasonably well-known books... (except when they're not novels
But The BURIED Book Club is only about things like KNOT=well=known books which are novels.
Gregsamsa wrote: "Don't feel bad, Declan, ..."?? wrong thread, maybe?
And indeed, worldcat is a handy little searching machine.
I've got my arbitrary criteria and whatknot up there ;; but you fellow Spade=Wielders could help me out a bit by registering your views of possible answers to the question :: What is a BURIED Book? Not so much to revise the RULEZ, which is ALLways a possibility, but to articulate what the FRAK we're doing here, in a general philosophical manner.... Any thoughts?
First and foremost, a BURIED Book is a great book. It is akin to buried treasure. Without treasureness there is no meaning to its buriedness. Without value, it's merely detritus. It must either have been assayed for value, or else its glitteriness or location within a seam that has historically yielded value must indicate a high probability of treasureness.
i agree with zad--the only buried books that interest me are ones that inspire passionate responses. otherwise, one might as well plunder publication databases indiscriminately.
Yep. We're gunna wanna have some Greatness!
Second and secondmost (post-vanguard), a BURIED Book is evidence of a capricious universe.
That they are GREAT books, that is obvious, that they are notwellknown is obvious--now how to determine the set? Or maybe it's not obvious.It seems as though that sort of describing--a sort of static circumvolution of abstracted components, doesn't help us come to terms with what a buried book IS--meaning, what a great and notwellknown book is. That that which we recognize as BURIED, satisfies some aesthetic criteria--well, and these points obtaining elsewhere and ad finitum. What is a great book? For some reason that is not a compelling question--personally. For me, the spirit of this club is contiguous with the spirit of The Hunt--the sense of adventure and, potentially, peril or wasted time over something not worth reading--a near constant prying and looking through things halfglanced at the library or a used book place--of course, usefully using the GR-databse to see if the book's wellknown......... To find something, first of all, which piques something somewhere, secondly to review its history and exposure if possible (to determine its knownedness), thirdly to read it, and finally to submit it to the fine discriminating faculties, as with any book, and judge it from one's own perspective and objectively--meaning placing no greater emphasis on one of its facets over another of its facets.
Things have generally gone well all around though. The main exclusionary principal that's important is to avoiding boosterism with regards to living writers who may rather be "undiscovered" than "buried." The same dilemmas which were with us remain, with regards to books that aren't novels/romances/epics. I.e., it's not entirely clear how to handle plays/poems/essays, etc. It's certainly arguable that all short-form poetry is buried, but then there are a host of us round these parts who just don't quite get poetry, and how can we distinguished the *really* buried from the that's just par for the course for poetry type poets.Anyway, with regards to grey areas and close-calls, I'd say the degree of enthusiasm of the promoter should factor. I.e. "This book has 17 reviews and may be kind of intriguing" doesn't hold as much promise as "This book has only 80 reviews but I personally endorse it as a masterpiece, and it's been cited by literary critics through the ages as guaranteed bees knees, so what the hell is wrong with the universe!?"
Yeah, I'd like to see people reading more buried poetry--though this zone probably isn't the forum for that, seeming overwhelmingly dedicated to Fiction (this is good; keep it simple where already it strays from simplicity). And that task might be somewhat more of a pedagogical one--anyway it wouldn't hurt for it to have that overtone. I don't think many readers, even those who did an Anglish major, know how to scan a poem. Most modern prose comes in some mode of discreteness--most usually the paragraph--and in poetry the stanza--and, as I find it, a good feeling for poetry and, better, a good feeling for the poetic line makes for a richer reading of prose--one is alive to the stresses, and rhythms, which allow our critics, not always too clumsily, to describe prose as poetic....Remember that "stanza" is Italian for "room"...and that we've only been with the spaces between words for a short time!!!
i wonder why there is that 'par for the course' thing with poetry, like with plays (which makes more sense just because of their function)--i guess niche audience? same deal with most essays & lit crit. also, strongly agreed with eric re poetry & rich readings of prose (though i still have absolutely no idea how to read poetry, i just know that i like some of it). i wonder how many of the authors archived herein have prose styles that can be considered explicitly poetic?
Thanks for the words folks!what a buried book IS--meaning, what a great and notwellknown book is.
In other words, right, there is no point looking for empirically existing characteristics by means of which we could sort books using an algorithm. Much more a kind of family resemblance. And like Greatness in general, a prior familiarity with the BURIED (or, The Great) is required in order to recognized the BURIED qua BURIED. Otherwise, you're just, how did he put it? pawing through old publishers catalogues.
The Hunt--the sense of adventure and, potentially, peril or wasted time over something not worth reading
Yes, the way lies Risk. But blurbs by Hawkes et al substantially reduces that Risk.
secondly to review its history and exposure if possible
This is an important Hegelian element ; the having-come-to-be-(BURIED) is part of the being of the book itself.
judge it from one's own perspective and objectively.
And fourthly, placing it under judgement of Other Readers, since reading is a social activity.
who may rather be "undiscovered" than "buried."
Important distinction. Both, however, would be targets I believe of the discriminating reader.
the degree of enthusiasm of the promoter should factor.
Absolutely! Definitely! And other synonyms of Yes! The AdVOCation is utter important. But still to distinguish the BURIED from the UNDERread ; but yes, the judgement of the reading subjectivity is much more compelling the the judgement of the gr db.
But I really should have excluded POETRY from the BBC. If only so that POETRY would get a descent treatment because I'm the last purson on the planet who should be making any kinds of judgements about POETRY.
SUGGESTIONIt might behoove us to have some element in this here BBC whereby to drop Names and Titles of STUFF that's not really (read: technically) BURIED but sure has hell has that certain aroma around it. We'd still need some kind of parameters (if only to reduce arbitrariness somewhat) -- which parameters our well=experience'd SPADE-wielders seem to have a good NOSE for. Any suggestions?
--This NUDGE brought to you by Nate D and Ronald Morton.
For my own sake, c-n-p of Ali's contro-bution ::nr :: an ENUFF with the CRITERIA thread/folder
I've thought of suggesting something like that before, not so much as a defiance of the CRITERIA, which I mostly think are acceptible, but an area for all the odds n' ends that wouldn't quite fit into the other sections, for instance Paolo Volponi's novel (buried, not-market-shaped in the least, worth your reading time, yet as Peter says perhaps not compulsory), or challenging novels no one reads that were published too recently, or newer translations that get no attention (though she doesn't apply for the group, I'm thinking in particular of cases like France Daigle's For Sure, a Governor General's Award Winner that received a grand total of one English review in the year after Robert Majzels published his translation.) Of course they would still need to be BURIED (no need to open the door to all those mainstream bestsellers with their seventy ratings and four reviews), and the focus would remain on the elitist and unsung and away from the market; the restrictions would just be a little laxer.
https://www.goodreads.com/comment/ind...
Down with crown myn kernig. You are a one liable to leave us reft of our less buries texts, but nathless clod-hung. GrrerRWwAWr!!! I aye this movement if but neigh this here Tirent!!
Eric wrote: "I aye this movement if but neigh this here Tirent!! "We are an anarcho-syndicalist collective........
--Tirant Lo Blanc
I would like to suggest a NEW FEATURE!!! I think it aligns well with this group's focus.It could be a thread titled You Haven't Read This. There, recommend a book that:
-YOU have read
-YOU believe is an excellent book that members might appreciate
-NO other member has read yet
-PREFERABLY, NO other member has even considered reading
How do you know? Well
-Go Here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/book_... (That searches for member's reviews of whatever book you put in the search box)
-search out a book by title, ISBN, whatever
-find it and click "view group reviews"
-if no one has even added it to their to-read list, and no one has commented on the book in any way, you've found something suitable
-if a couple of people have added it to to-read long ago but never actually read it, use discretion.
This feature could possibly fit into the Knot-Really-Buboes folder, or something. It can serve the purpose of either
A) Pointing this group's members to their blind-spots
or
B) Reminding them of something that's truly buried, has already been added more than a year ago, and no one ever picked up the challenge!
Finally, when people do read the book and tell you it sucks, blame yourself or blame them. If Nathan kicks me out of the group for proposing this feature, then I blame William T. Vollmann.
sounds good.now but first can you give me an argument for why this idea is not redundant? because to implement it all I'd have to do is create a thread.
I'm not sure I can effectively argue that it's not redundant, so instead I'll argue that redundancy is okay.Consider it another tool in the toolbox. Perhaps it's another way that one might unearth something that's buried with regards to other members of the group, which one might not otherwise discover.
But actually, it's damnably hard to find a great work, or even a rather-good work, that hasn't been read by anyone else in the group. There are many silent but well-read members, there's a lot of diversity of interests, and meanwhile when one member adds a book, someone else somewhere generally picks up on it... so... will it work?
If anyone finds a gem, it can serve as bragging-rights and shaming-power to lord over the unenlightened.
pretty much what I was thinking. Just a sec.
how's that ?https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
We can hammer it into better shape if you like. just c-n-p your fore=going comment. or whatev'.
Yeah, I'll do cut and paste and see where it goes... cheerio.
I see I was responsible for a nudge in absentia, which I'd like to amend now by appearing in situ. First, Zag's thread is already off and running, which is great.But there still lies the problem of marginal works that are not buried enough for our criteria, but still not being read. I usually just list them in my "Currently Unburying" or "Archive of Buried Reviews" posts, which seems to have an effect as some of you have at least claimed to intend to eventually read Mustafa Mutabaruka's amazing, recent-but-insta-buried Seed. I guess just dropping them in chatter works to some extent.
Or we can just loosen up the rules a little when greatness overrules actual readership (i.e. most of Julian Gracq's major works are barely disqualified, but he still got a thread somehow, which I think is as it should be. Or the recent Mirbeau discussion is another one where I'd tend to say that despite three semi-read books, he is extremely relevant to our collective interests. So maybe it's just a matter of judgement and under-read greatness?
What yer lookin' fur ::Knot Really BURIED, But....
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...
(SEED would belong here)
I think I was able to qualify Mirbeau under the One(Two)=Hit Wonder exception ; given that I understand he's got lots more under there.
Aha. I hadn't even seen that spot, but good to know.
Sketchbook wrote: "Sorry about my clunky comment on this most valued site. I feel it has gotten too big - en generale - and maybe it should be confined to writers in English. Then, a sub-thread for other languages."Gotta disagree. Most part. Thing is, the BURIED Book Club is kind of organized as a benefit for readers in the English language ; and one thing that happens in a literary culture (the Anglo one) in which readers read so very precious little in translation is that books written in not-English have a higher tendency to become BURIED vis-a-vis what I take to be the BBC's main audience, monolingual readers of English. So I'm not really about to separate out on the basis of original languages. HOWEVER, I would be more than happy to look at the criteria for including books quite POPular on their home turf but not known and/or BURIED vis-a-vis the English Reader. Because, right? there's been some stuff being snuck into the BBC which have simply HUGE raw gr=numbers.
Also, lots of stuff gets ADD'd just for the sake of ADD'ing with really no one adVOCating therefore. So, that's one source of lots and lots of stuff. It's certainly not merely a numbers game ; we want The Good Great Greatest Stuff for sure!
One easy way to game the system is just to keep those comments flowing so that those CORPSEs which really deserve attention stay at the top of each their respective threads. The stuff no one comments on will continue to fall further down those threads until... well, it's a lot of rising up and rising down.
I'm also all for non-English writers -- I'd have much less use for all of this were it to be confined to a single language!
DATEline BBC. RuleZ & Reg's (finally!) get an Update'ing.okay and so but I thought somewhere I had listed this criteria of how we were looking for those authors whose first work of significance/etc was prior to 1985. That I had made that explicit or something somewhere. At anyrate == now that the BURIED Book Club is 5 years+ old ;; it's time to catch up with the TIMES!!! So, now I'll sort of be starting the count of generations at roughly around 1990 :: meaning of course that for our arbitrary purposes, an author may be ADD'd if she/he has pub'd a first significant work prior to 1990.
And seriously, no smart=ass Socratic questions like "But how do you define 'significant'?" Because I "define" it the same as you. Etc. etc.
Anthony wrote: "TIme flies when you're shoveling."Speaking of which ; I found a (near) BURIED=rec for you this morning. Hard Boiled? --> Fast One.
The BURIED Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Fast One (other topics)Up (other topics)
Seed (other topics)
Tirant Lo Blanc (other topics)
Bouvard and Pécuchet (other topics)
I have loads of rules and regulations. WHY not? This Club is designed to serve MY purposes. I want to find more books, a very peculiar set of books, more books than I'll have time to read or fundaments to afford.
A) You will find more than a whiff of SNOB and pretense and ELITEism here, of course, it's the nature of the BEAST.
A.a) LURKERZ be welcome! ContriBUTORS of course needED.
B) We are looking for BOOKS, mostly fiction, which fall within a TRADITION of writing novel things, often NOVELS but sometimes stories or essays or POETRY or other things; a tradition of experimentation, innovation; a tradition of LIT-UR-A-CHUR. [We should construe this as broadly as possible without risking the inclusion of market-shaped commodities]
B.β) Use the "add book/author" FUNctionality to create links which WILL self-rePlicate, bringing light to BURIED books, and AIR.
c) we need some delineations and fuzzy definitions. You will find authors and their books with FEW ratings and reviews and ADDS on goodreads. What? Maybe like fewer than 30 ratings? or 50 ratings? Nearly no reviews. That kind of thing. But numbers hard and fast won't really work (but they'll have to) because we want book data to INCREASE and books to GRADuate out of BURIED. [THE WAKE don't count.]
d) No need to have written a dissertation on a book in order to include it here. Only a whiff is required suggesting that something might be lost if we don't rush in to rescue.
Ee) Absolutely NO goodreads authors. NO self-promotion, except as to the promotion of your REVIEWS of BURIED books. And by this I mean that THE Belch is NOT BURIED. Not here. Self-Prom will get you KICKed OUT! Danke. [as an alternative for those seeking to self-prom, let me point you to all the plethora of listOPIAte!]
G) Many authors here will be dead; many books Oot-Of-Print. But not by necessity. de la Pava has no place in this CLUB.
8) Yes, this entire thing is redundant of goodreads itself. So WHAT? Also, it might resemble a bit and function redundantly with that OTHER FAMOUS club, the Completionist.
9) Organized by Authors, because that is how my brain works. BUT, some authors (famous) may have individual books which got BURIED, like maybe Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, but that's probably not REALLY buried, like as in REALLY buried.
gG) DO say something about your books(authors) and DO link your reviews should you have some. Please, not just to drop names and links, but to put a few sentences together about what you do and do not know about X and what you would LIKE to know about Y and what your hopes are for Z.
jjj) SOME books may be populaire at home but BURIED to the rest of us, and since the limits of my language are the limits of my world, they might be BURIED in relation to ENGlish langUAGE readers. THESE BOOKS, please include them HERE so we can carry their torch across national boundaries to the CENTER of the BOOK univERse which we all know to be The BURIED Book Club.
MnM) ADD books to the CLUB's bookshELVES. And if Librarian ye be, please consider doing some tidying of those neglected and BURIED AUTHOR pages here on goodreads, in the interest of having dust-free data; add photos, provide links, input some bio-data, that kind of stuff.
N-O-P : BURIED books and their correlatively BURIED authors require ADVOCATES and CHAMPIONS. ThereFORe, we are not interested in compiling a list of seldom rated books simpliciter, but rather much more, books which YOU give a damn about. And that DAMN may be the minimal "I've just gotta know more." You may not know much, but know only enough that you know you need to know more. When starting a THREAD (Ariadne's, even) the assumption which shall rule the DAY (sans rue) is that YOU shall play point in bringing forth the SINNED AGAINST. [thusly has been the practice and the precedent and thusly shall we sally-forth, spade in hand]
10) I'm a hard-ass, so I'll leave this thread open for discussion and objections and questions and clarifications and condemnations and such things pertaining to this WORK-in-proGRESS RULEX.
Q1. WHEREAS we are advocating our books and SPEAKING for those withOUT voice, AND FURTHERMORE (add a few more WHEREAS's) dot dot dot PLEASE to expect to see when I consider certification that YOU dearest reader have ADD'd our author-in-question already to your TO-READ because if you've not whose to say YER advocating this BOOK, this AUTHOR. EXPLANANDUM :: In my offices of ModeratOR and CertifiOR, I wood like to see YOU having ADD'd what you are Advocating in our CLUB, when ADDing to our CLUB.