No deaths of anybody under 18 or no deaths of children-children?
I really liked A Visit from the Goon Squad.
I'm reading Skippy Dies right now, but that obviously doesn't qualify.
Right Ho, Jeeves
Just Kids
The World Without Us
Castle Waiting
No deaths that would make a sentimental mother identify with the mother of the dead child.
4: So Euripides's Medea would be OK, then?
Don Quixote (in translation, obvs.)
Emma.
I wonder whether Never Let Me Go violates the rule or not. Good book!
The Goon Squad does look good. I keep feeling like I've read something by Jennifer Egan, but not any of the books showing up on Amazon.
I really liked Never Let Me Go, but I've read it.
Anyone read Anne Patchett's new book?
7: I'm thinking not, because there are no moms around.
I liked it too! Halford and I agree on something! Hurray!
8: She also write occassional articles for the NYT magazine.
I think that's probably it. Not to kill the thread too early, but I'm going to choose The Goon Squad. It's piqued my interest.
I'm about to start a book on the Donner Party but that seems to violate all your rules.
Unless someone well-informed shows up and says "Oh good lord, that's a terrible choice." Please speak up if that's you.
Way to slap a thread into oblivion peep.
17: Bad peep! You should have been doing your job!
I have fewer tricks than a one-trick pony.
I'm not actually recommending this, but: Smokejumpers!
Speaking of books, I've finished the new George R.R.R.R.R.R.R.R.R. Martin book, A Colossal Wedge of Nerdy Something with Nerdy Somethings, so if anyone wants it, e-mail me your mailing address or whatnot. First come, first served, etc.
Given the big news of the last few weeks, how about Scoop?
I too enjoyed A Visit from the Goon Squad. Her first novel was kind of crummy, but I've liked all the other Egan I've read.
I'm currently reading The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (John LeCarre's kid). Would your book club prefer a book with ninjas, Heebie? Because this book has ninjas.
If you get stuck for lines to write from Pauly, you can always borrow lines from his twitter feed.
re: 26.last
I enjoyed it a lot. It was clearly a first book, iyswim, but very interested to see what he does next.
The "no death of children" rule has kind of a "don't think about elephants" effect, n'est-ce pas? Now I am going to youtube to listen to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder.
The Gone-Away World sounds great. I will have to start a book group so I can read it.
My default book recommendation is "Eastern Approaches" but it's non-fiction; failing that, have they read "Wolf Hall"?
Recently read and liked, and containing no child death:
Tom Rachman - The Imperfectionists
Manu Joseph - Serious Men (very, very funny!)
Emma Donaghue - Room
Miguel Syjuco - Ilustrado
Charles Yu - How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed
Alice Munro - Too Much Happiness
Actually, now I think about it, "Eastern Approaches" involves child death. (One, offstage.)
31. Wait, never mind. I think both the Rachman and the Munro book have a child death.
31 - doesn't Room also? The child before the protagonist.
Jms is turning out to be a highly unreliable detector of dead children.
Primo Levi's "The Truce" is pretty good too. No child death.
34. Oh I forgot about that. But that's just background, and happens way before the events of the book, does that count?
Mat Johnson's Pym has some child death, but not human, really. For the rest of you, read this fucking book; it's so good it made me want to put out my eyes because I will never write anything that good ever.
For book club, Code of the Woosters? Fun Home?
38.1: Do I need to read the book by Poe first?
39. I think h-g gave the implicit okay to mass child incarceration and slow dismemberment, so -- maybe?
40: Nope! The book describes what you need to know about Pym, as well as Olaudah Equiano, which also plays a role. But to me it's probably most like Gulliver's Travels--starts off as depressed dude goes adventuring, ends in... I won't tell you! But it's totally devastating and hilarious.
I was just going to say that Dangerous Liaisons is the best summer reading. I try to assign it every summer because students, even ones who hate reading, just go insane about it. Plus, it's translated, so you get the 18th-c deliciousness without the slight barrier of 18th-c mile-long sentences.
Under the Banner of Heaven or Into the Wild.
Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathaniel West
The Death of Artemio Cruz, Carlos Fuentes
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower (short stories)
Jesus' Son, Johnson
Ha, I was about to suggest Miss Lonelyhearts, but I think that's a bad idea with HG's crowd.
The French is quite readable, no worse than Balzac who wrote chapters for serials while addled on megadoses of coffee.
Any Jonathan Carroll fans here? His books start out as realistic fiction and then detour, quite a bit like Pym. His Marriage of Sticks is nice.
30 last -- if we have enough people who have read it, can I schedule a therapy session to figure out why I didn't like Wolf Hall? I can think of few people more intuitively sympathetic to a warm historical fictional portrayal of Thomas Cromwell than me, and yet I found it basically unreadable.
I came this close to getting a book club to read The History of Henry Esmond (an all time favorite) but didn't succeed.
"South" is very good - better than "The Worst Journey in the World" because it pretty much only has one plot.
re: 43
Yeah, I read that as a 1st year English undergrad and loved it.
Ha, I was about to suggest Miss Lonelyhearts, but I think that's a bad idea with HG's crowd.
This group is mostly Unitarian SAHMs, so normal Texas trappings don't really apply.
Miss Lonelyhearts is just fucking brutal and nihilistic is all. Of all the horrible books I've taught, I have in my mind a category of things that make students angry or upset, like Dangerous Liaisons or Lolita or Gulliver's Travels, but the only thing I've ever taught that practically turned the whole class against me was Miss Lonelyhearts.
We should have a simultaneous Unfogged book club reading of whatever book Heebie chooses. Guaranteed to drive Heebie insane!
I am currently in the middle of What Maisie Knew. It is quite unexpected.
56: This would entertain me. (I suppose until it stopped being entertaining. Maybe it would drive me nuts.) For tonight, we should have all read True Grit. It was pretty great, wasn't it? I laughed a lot. The voice really does read like a Cohen Brothers narrator. She's so upright and prudent.
55: Ah. I probably might not love it myself.
26, 28, 30: [re: The Gone-Away World ].
Hmm, I thought it had great promise and liked it for awhile, but finished it semi-enraged. I forget the specific concerns, mostly of the "small world" problem* (and yes I know it literally has become a small world) and gratuitous witty and "knowing" depictions of violence and death. However, I seem to get semi-enraged easily these days so . One of my kids recently opined that I certainly was the "biggest hater" they knew.
*There is some other name for this that I am forgetting--basically where all the movers and shakers in the imagined world are all randomly running into each other all the time. I realize this is somewhat inherent in the structure of many types of narrative.
Yeah, Miss Lonelyhearts is for haters.
re: 55
The one that divided our 2nd year lit seminar was Geek Love (Katherine Dunn) which was loved and hated in about equal measure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Love [spoilers]
re: 60
The witty and knowing descriptions of violence and death are part of the charm of it, I think. He's riffing on a certain kind of genre fiction/kung-fu movie/wuxia thing. It seems a bit po-faced to take that seriously. I get much more annoyed by depictions of violence and death in crime fiction, which can be voyeuristic and nasty.
Why does Gulliver's Travels make students upset? I could see Tale of a Tub, especially in America, but Gulliver?
62: My roommate taught that last semester and had a similar reaction. Our Public College students (she's at a different branch of the system) are, despite being the most diverse body of students, probably in the world, the most intensely normative people I've ever met. Being normal is the only good. They apparently did not see any value or purpose or wisdom in Geek Love.
Not two books that I thought were great but good book club material: Mitchell's Black Swan Green (but now that I think about there is a very tangential (but early) mention of the death of a child--what is the threshold?) and Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. And Independent People is right out on the dead child part.
63: I've certainly appreciated that style from time-to-time, but it just seems to be overused, or maybe I've just gotten tired of it. I blame Quentin Tarantino.
64: Hm. I really don't see how one can read it without seeing it as a devastating evisceration of humanity. I'm aware that some people think of it as "fun" or adventurish, but I just don't see how it's not obviously a book about suffering, slavery, oppression, rape, self-loathing, etc. It's one of the most disgusting and upsetting things I've ever read, more so to me than Tale of a Tub, which has only a few flashes of the deep horror ("I saw a woman flayed") of Gulliver's Travels.
62, 65: I didn't like "Geek Love" in the slightest -- had a fairly strong 'that's not funny, that's sick' reaction to it, which is not a problem I usually have with books presenting unusual lives or perspectives. I read it ages ago, so I don't have a detailed memory of what exactly set me off, but I found it unpleasant and uncomfortable to read in a way that didn't feel valuable at all.
Doesn't mean that it's a bad book, but I'm not surprised it was divisive. If I'd read it in a class I would have been stifling my actual reaction in an attempt to pass as sophisticated and openminded.
I just got Independent People based on Nosflow and Stormcrow. And just poured myself some cold brewed ice tea. The blog is taking over!
re: 65
I think more or less everyone in that seminar [about 9 people] who was young liked it, but we had 3 mature students in the class, and two of them hated it. One vehemently.
Your students always sound a bit like aliens compared to my experience as an undergrad [early 90s, Glasgow]. Although there are elements of that in the students I've taught myself, since.
I'm about halfway through Geek Love right now. I'm enjoying it so far, but that probably doesn't surprise anybody.
I tried to read Geek Love in middle school, and really just skimmed it for the lurid parts, and I don't remember barely any of it.
Goon Squad was a pleasure. I also recently read Lord of Misrule (young woman works at broken-down West Virginia thoroughbred track in the 1970s), which was nearly great, but the end wasn't quite as amazing as the beginning.
73: Me too! I mean, maybe I was 13 or so and starting high school. I hated it and it completely creeped me out in ways that made me scornful.
I'm a little surprised at the depth of enmity toward Geek Love. I guess I'll not be recommending Harry Crews to this crowd (though you should absolutely read Harry Crews).
So, nobody has anything bad to say about Visit From the Goon Squad? I would have guessed more people would have read it, and at least one person would hate it.
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Man, law students just keep on getting younger. I just briefed the most adorable tousled-haired boy from Yale Law on a case I'm working on, and had to actively restrain myself from pinching his cheeks.
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79: In about 8 years he'll be working on a scheme to legally pauperize your children. Sounds cute, though.
I just briefed the most adorable tousled-haired boy from Yale Law
Is getting briefed worse than getting pantsed?
I would have guessed more people would have read it
Based on this thread I just put in a hold request at the library. I won't get it for a couple of months, however.
81 makes me understand that I may have interpreted "tousled-haired" and "cheeks" incorrectly.
Is child rape OK?
If so, you might like Hoban's Pilgermann!
More blegging: I'm taking over the Honors program. I just expelled a handful of students for having 2 consecutive semesters below the Honors cumulative GPA cutoff.
I just got a very reasonable, polite email asking if there was any way to appeal the Honors termination, because she's going to retake a couple of the classes that were so hard in the spring, and (etc, doesn't really matter.)
I don't yet have a policy on appeals to termination. Thoughts?
They have an appeal option: They can retake, once, classes that put them below the GPA cutoff. But if they don't achieve sufficiently high grades in those classes to get back into the honors program, they have to perform yard work/babysitting for you until they graduate. Problem solved.
I don't yet have a policy on appeals to termination. Thoughts?
If they are terminated is there any way for them to re-enter the honors program at a later date? That would affect the appeals policy.
I don't yet have a policy on appeals to termination. Thoughts?
Unless your university has a policy against it, I'd encourage sexual favors and/or cash.
It never came up during the 3 years I was on the Honors committee, so probably no one has any institutional memory of such a thing.
I could declare pretty much whatever I want - you have to appeal to the faculty committee, you are out of luck, you are in luck, you have to appeal to me, you have to reapply for readmittance, etc.
I remember having a conversation with my parents, when I was leaving for college, about the idea that it was worth trying things that were difficult, even if it meant getting into a class, realizing it was harder than I thought, and getting a bad grade.
I do think it's valuable to have students that believe that, and that there isn't much in the college experience to support the idea that you can have a successful experience in a class even if you end up with a bad grade.
So I think the appeals process should involve them writing something about what it was they found interesting or what they learned in the classes in which they got poor grades. If they can at least explain why the material is interesting and valuable (even if they, personally struggled with it) that's worth something in my eyes.
If they can't even explain what they were supposed to be learning in the class, and are taking it again in hopes that this time they'll be able to figure it out then I think the termination from the honors program is appropriate and the appeal should be denied -- they aren't doing work of sufficient quality.
Bring them into your office, flip a coin, and say "Call it, Friendo."
I can bite my tongue no longer. You should be chancellor, Heebie! Or president! OF THESE GREAT UNITED STATES! Because you are THE BEST!!!!!!
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Might ogged (pbuh) return as a reality tv star? Will all ethnic stereotypes be confirmed? Will TV audiences learn to embrace teh Mexicans? Personally, I'm predicting lots of black beemers, unfortunate eyebrow-plucking, overbearing families, and nose-jobs. Plus heavy-handed attempts at topicality.
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Oh, Flippanter, if nobody has claimed the George RRRR Martin opus, I want it! You should come to an NYC meetup one of these days, if only to save postage...
Should I read the first 100 replies or go straight to the cock jokes ?
99: I'm sorry, but it's been taken. But I'll try to come to the next NYC-up. Cough suggest somewhere, anywhere but Fresh Salt cough for God's sake people cough.
76: I want to be comfortable liking Harry Crews, but I feel like that's not too far removed from liking Hunter S. Thompson or H.L. Mencken. Also, I thought The Knockout Artist and Muscle were not that great.
26,28,30,60,63:
Love The Gone-Away World but was probably a bit too gushy about it in my review, but then I'm a sucker for these sort of books. (Liked The Raw Shark Texts as well.)
I feel like that's not too far removed from liking Hunter S. Thompson or H.L. Mencken.
Nothing wrong with Hunter S. Thompson and H.L. Menken. Or at least, nothing that a brain transplant couldn't fix.
Try asking colleagues in other fields/nicking their course outlines? The physics/bio/chem/wevs people might have a system you can repurpose easily.
Well, I ended up getting displaced. I'm not hosting until September now. Our August book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Slacks, which looks great.
That is supposed to be good and Henrietta is fully grown when she dies.
109: I thought it was terrible, like a book-length Time magazine article.