New Book, New Meeting Location

Tomorrow is our last meeting at Books Inc. Chestnut Street!  We're moving to Books Inc. Opera Plaza for our May discussion, which will be on May 12th at 6 PM.  Thanks to Books Inc. Chestnut Street for two years of extreme hospitality.

Tomorrow's book is J.G. Ballard's High Rise and the discussion is at 7 PM at 2251 Chestnut St.  The title for May is Hunger by Knut Hamsun and will be hosted at 601 Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco.

A true classic of modern literature that has been described as “one of the most disturbing novels in existence” (Time Out), Hunger is the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets, struggling on the edge of starvation. As hunger overtakes him, he slides inexorably into paranoia and despair. The descent into madness is recounted by the unnamed narrator in increasingly urgent and disjointed prose, as he loses his grip on reality.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780374531102

2nd Anniversary

I wanted to recap all the books we've read since April 2011.  Thanks for participating!

J.G. Ballard - High Rise (current title; to be discussed April 14th, 2013)
Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory
Philip K. Dick - Valis
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
Gertrude Stein - Three Lives
Kobo Abe - The Box Man
Andre Gide - Lafcadio's Adventures
Herman Melville - The Confidence-Man
Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
Andre Breton - Nadja
J.P. Donleavey - Ginger Man
Virginia Woolf - Orlando
Georges Bataille - Story of the Eye
Samuel Beckett - Watt
Richard Brautigan - Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar
Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis & Other Stories
Raymond Queneau - Exercises in Style
Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea
Nathaniel West - Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust
Djuna Barnes - Nightwood
Robert Walser - Jakob Von Gunten
George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman

J.G. Ballard - High Rise

Hello--hope you dug The Wasp Factory.  We'll discuss it on Sunday at 7 (yeah, back to the normal meeting time).

Next month, how about J.G. Ballard's High Rise?  I've read a few from this fellow and thoroughly enjoyed them, hope this is no exception!  April the 14th at 7 PM!

"Harsh and ingenious! "High Rise" is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind."--Martin Amis, "New Statesman."
http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780871404022

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory

Hello.  Hope everyone is enjoying or enjoyed or will enjoy VALIS as much as I did!  Don't forget, we'll meet at 5:15 PM instead of 7 PM this Sunday, February 10th.

The pick for next month is The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.  Word on the street: it's pretty dark and intense.  Hopefully it proves to be an entertaining/engaging selection.  We'll meet on March 10th at 7 PM.  Don't forget to move your clock hands forward and give me a hug for being on planet earth for 27 years.

 

**Update: I started reading The Wasp Factory and am enjoying it but felt I should post a disclaimer: the book contains fairly graphic depictions of animal and human cruelty.**

 

Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least:
Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.
That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again.
It was just a stage I was going through.

--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780684853154

Valis meeting time chage

I accidentally double booked my night next Sunday during the discussion, so the regulars and I agreed to meet at 5:15 PM instead of 7 PM on February 10th at the usual spot, 2251 Chestnut St.  If there's any issues or questions, reply to this post and I'll sort you out!  We'll be back to the normal time next month.

Phillip K. Dick - Valis

Welcome back after a month off... hope everyone enjoyed reading The Sound and the Fury.  We'll discuss it on Sunday the 11th at 7 PM.  I still have a bit left to go, so don't spoil it for me or anything.

For next month, I thought we should try something a bit different--how about Phillip K. Dick's Valis?  This fellow was pretty much my favorite author in high school, but after getting sucked into the whole modernism thing, I feel like I lost the science fiction thread.  Thing is, I feel like the two aren't mutually exclusive, so I think we can swing this thematically.  That meeting will be on the second Sunday as usual, February 10th at 7 PM at Books Inc on Chestnut St.

The first book in Philip K. Dick's final trilogy (followed by The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer), VALIS encapsulates many of the themes that Dick was obsessed with over the course of his career. A disorienting and bleakly funny novel, VALIS (which stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System) is about a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip Dick); the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity; and reality as revealed through a pink laser. VALIS is a theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.
Taking place in the same universe as Dick's soon-to-be-published Exegesis, VALIS is a dense novel, but one that is absolutely essential to understanding the author's off-kilter worldview. Much like Dick himself, the reader is left wondering what is real, what is fiction, and what the price is for divine inspiration.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780547572413

William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury

I'm really into "Three Lives" and I hope you are, really, too excited about reading Gertrude Stein and her "Three Lives," the titular book being ever awful absurd and also actually being really entirely right heartbreaking in one fell stroke, really.  I am with my continual thinking wondering how it is that she does that, making it so ever real absurd and ever so rightly heartbreaking all at once.  We'll completely be having our discussing it at each other now at 7 PM on Sunday, ever for real, with our Gertrude Stein and her mighty present volume of "Three Lives," so won't you come along, now, won't you.

As for next month, we'll be taking a pass because of the holidaze and resuming in January.  For then, Vincent's pick, "The Sound and the Fury" will be the star of the show.  I've never read Faulkner, so I'm in pretty dire straits as a result; not sure how I've even made it this far in life without him, honestly.  January 13th at 7 PM.

 

“I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. . . . I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” —from The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and  one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780679732242