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The Idle Book Log: unofficial recommendations for forthcoming Idle Thumbs Book Clubs.

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I wouldn't mind revisiting Bel Canto by Ann Patchett or Mariette in Ecstasy by Rob Hanson. They aren't super long yet can generate plenty of discussion. Much like an email that can be read on the podcast. ^_^

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I wouldn't mind revisiting Bel Canto by Ann Patchett or Mariette in Ecstasy by Rob Hanson. They aren't super long yet can generate plenty of discussion. Much like an email that can be read on the podcast. ^_^

Bel Canto is on our own list of potential selections as well, actually.

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Chris, do you have any Kerouac on the list? I feel like On The Road is one of those books that everybody thinks they should read but never get around to. That is my UK perspective anyway, most people here know what it is but have never actually read it. I've been reading a little bit of it every time I'm on a train this summer (it doesn't feel right to read it while stationary). More than anything it just makes me want to visit San Francisco.

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Does anyone know what sort of boundaries are in place for the books that are eligible for discussion? I know this is exclusively intended for contemporary literature, but at what point can the book in question blur between mainstream literature and genre? For example, I would love to submit Ben Okri's The Famished Road or Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World/ Angelmaker for possible discussion, but would magical realism or gonzo post-apocalyptic scenarios veer too much away from the focus of the book club? They're marketed as lit with a capital L, but they clearly straddle genre conventions.

It would be an incredibly narrow, short sighted, snobbish, and quite simply a dumb action to take, in limiting books to those marketed as Literary. The works of Poe, Shakespeare, Borges, Wolfe, Bradbury, Ellison, and legions of others are no less worthy of consideration just because they are authors who work primarily as fantasists.

The Thumbs crew seem to be too well rounded and read to fall into such a limited criteria.

Anyway, some none Pop-Lit recommendations:

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

Shriek:An Afterward by Jeff Vandermeer

Growing up Dead in Texas by Stephen Graham Jones

Non-Fiction:

The Demon Haunted World:Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

Discarded Science by John Grant

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oh jesus that took me three years to read.

Yeah, probably not appropriate. I recommended it for selfish reasons, I'd like a support group to help me read it.

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Yeah, probably not appropriate. I recommended it for selfish reasons, I'd like a support group to help me read it.

Your pain is our pain.

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I'd like to suggest Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. It was the Booker winner in 1999, and Coetzee subsequently won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's pretty dark, with a particularly unsympathetic protagonist, but I found it offerred some profound insights into the human condition, and I still feel it's influence on me more than a decade after reading it.

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The Demon Haunted World:Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

I absolutely adore this book, and credit it at least in part for making me the person I am today, but I don't really think it would generate the same kind of thoughtful discussion that a lot of the other suggestions potentially could. When all is said and done, it's an extremely straight-forward book.

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I know that most people are enamored with 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but I'd really love to see Murakami's more emotional stuff discussed - like Sputnik Sweetheart, Norwegian Wood, or his short fiction.

By that same token, I think that Americana is my favorite DeLillo book. Not necessarily because it is his most penetrable, but because the heart beating at the center of it is so much more evident (with the exception of maybe the tail end of White Noise when everything starts coming together)

So read that stuff maybe? For the podcast?

OH ALSO wrt "genre fiction:" there is so much out there that plays at larger themes and social commentary and literary tropes that it would be worth embracing authors like Octavia Butler.

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I really want to recommend a book I don't think most of us would read or even know existed if not linked to it; The Zeroes, debut novel by Patrick Roesle. It's self-published and hasn't received widespread acclaim or anything which I understand might be a red flag, but it's really good. Most of it is deliberately mundane, which is also the sort of thing I understand might throw up red flags, but still amazing. It's a book that invariably makes me feel thoroughly miserable whenever I read it. I love it, and expect that a lot of people on these forums would at any rate be able to recognize themselves in it. I can't really describe it in any good way, but I absolutely recommend for everyone to at least read the free sample available on Amazon.

I want to make it clear that I'm not the author, by the way. I know it sounds like I'm shilling for this book, but i'm not a writer at all.

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I'd like to recommend This Earth of Mankind by Prameodya Ananta Toer. It's the first book in The Buru Quartet which the author wrote while he was imprisoned on the island of Buru and the Indonesian government banned the book in 1981. I don't really see too many people reading books from Indonesian authors, so I just thought I'd suggest one! You could also cover The Mute's Soliloquy if you were willing to talk about the authors memoir of his time spent imprisoned.

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Bel Canto is on our own list of potential selections as well, actually.

I don't know how much outside input you're going to take for book recommendations, but can this please be one of your picks?

Just for fun, I'd like to throw out The Art of Fielding as a possible suggestion. One of its major themes is about what modern male friendship looks like, which seems relevant for this podcast. Plus, it's so well written that it actually made me care about (college) baseball.

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I don't know how much outside input you're going to take for book recommendations, but can this please be one of your picks?

Just for fun, I'd like to throw out The Art of Fielding as a possible suggestion. One of its major themes is about what modern male friendship looks like, which seems relevant for this podcast. Plus, it's so well written that it actually made me care about (college) baseball.

I've heard so many great things about The Art of Fielding that I feel like I should probably read it. None of the three of us has read it so it might make for a good pick!

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I'd like to throw a few suggestions out there for books I'd love to revisit and/or hear some discussion on. I've tried to pick out books that are not too lengthy as it would benefit any discussion if more people could complete them.

Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin: I was directed to this book just after The Stanley Parable was released and it explores the concept of the unreliable narrator in some really interesting and entertaining ways

Philip K Dick - Ubik / The Man in the High Castle - I just selected the two books from Dick that I have enjoyed the most. His ability to craft fascinating worlds effortlessly has always amazed me.

Ursula Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness - I did not think that a science fiction story could floor me the way that this did. The relationships that develops over the course of the narrative really touched me.

Anyway, those are my suggestions. I'm look forward the opportunity to read all the selections that will be made for the book club.

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The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Yes! I third the pick for The Art of Fielding. I don't even like baseball, but really liked The Art of Fielding. Wouldn't mind reading it again. My only concern is that it kind of has the same "feel" as A Sense of an Ending does in that it's kind of a bildungsroman centered on a male character. Not sure if we want to branch out between books.

As an extra credit project, people should read Vanity Fair's How A Book is Born *after* The Art of Fielding:

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Vanity Fair's How a Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding by Keith Gessen

It's an interesting short piece about how the book got published.

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Given the short discussion of Le Carre in Episode 0, I'd love to see one of his books on here. I'd suggest A Perfect Spy, it's probably his most acclaimed pure stand-alone novel.

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I turned my non-gaming girlfriend onto the bookcast, and she really liked it. She had read both books already, and had a suggestion. The Manual Found at Saragosa. She noted that you guys might be open to pre-20th century books, and said this one is easily readable, and surprisingly modern for something 200 years old. It's a polish book written in the very late 1700s, and she said it reminded her of Cloud Atlas a bit. It's like 700 pages, so maybe not easy or feasible in a month. From the wiki:

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa collects intertwining stories, all of them set in whole or in part in Spain, with a large and colorful cast of Gypsies, thieves, inquisitors, a cabbalist, a geometer, the cabbalist's beautiful sister, two Moorish princesses (Emina and Zubeida), and others that the brave, perhaps foolhardy, Walloon Guard Alphonse van Worden meets, imagines or reads about in the Sierra Morena mountains of 18th-century Spain while en route to Madrid. Recounted to the narrator over the course of sixty-six days, the novel's stories quickly overshadow van Worden's frame story. The bulk of the stories revolve around the Gypsy chief Avadoro, whose story becomes a frame story itself. Eventually the narrative focus moves again toward van Worden's frame story and a conspiracy involving an underground — or perhaps entirely hallucinated — Muslim society, revealing the connections and correspondences between the hundred or so stories told over the novel's sixty-six days.

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A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. One tantalizing bit of info: Harold Bloom, who is the most eminent living literary critic, only wrote one novel. It was an attempt at a sequel to A Voyage to Arcturus. He has since disowned his sequel, The Flight to Lucifer, saying that if he could he would remove every copy of the book from every library if he could.

When idle book club is ready to reach back in time for a book but doesn't want something obvious, A Voyage to Arcturus would be great.

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The Dinner is a Dutch modern classic by Herman Koch, and I think it would be ideal for the podcast. I finished it, yesterday, in four sittings. It's set around two families having dinner with each other, and the murky secrets involving themselves and their children. Darkly ironic and very fascinating.

the-dinner-herman-koch.jpg

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Dinner-Herman-Koch/dp/1848873824

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Considering the names that keep coming up (Barnes, Wallace, Mitchell, Eco), I would say A House for Mr Biswas, The Wind-up Bird Chronical, and If on a winter's night a traveler, would all be pretty good fits.

Nice! I was trying to think of books that I would want to see outside of my main sci-fi genre; If on a winter's night a traveler was my first choice.

I would love to see some Philip K Dick though, like Ubik (because it is a classic) or Dr Bloodmoney (because not enough newer PKD readers know it)

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I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned any Cormac McCarthy. I've read quite a bit, though I think some of his better known books--The Road and No Country for Old Men--are not really his best (though good).

I'd love for you guys to read Blood Meridian. I sincerely put it in the cannon with books like The Sound and the Fury and Moby Dick. One of the best novels of the last 50 years.

I'd also throw A Sport and a Pasttime in there. James Salter is also one of the greatest living writers, also difficult, but without being dense. He and McCarthy both manage to be difficult by omission not complication. A Sport and a Pasttime is one of Salter's best.

As for a podcast suggestion: not to add more work, but I feel like a short mid-point book podcast would be fun, a sort of check in with your impressions of the book so far, things that are bothering or thrilling you guys, questions about what's to come. To compare to the game podcasts, quite frequently you discuss games while you are engaged with them, not after (which I realize is because games frequently don't have the arc, defined size, and coherency of a novel, but still...). It would also fuel good mid-reading discussions on the board, I think.

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Seeing both Borges and Calvino already mentioned, I'd like to suggest Paul Auster's metafictional novel, City of Glass.

It can also be found as the first of three stories contained within his New York Trilogy, and is probably best experienced within that context (I would love to hear a Thumb Club discussion involving all three), but it's a tale that can stand on its own merits if needed.

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