Our current Book Club selection, No One Will Miss Her, comes to a close tomorrow, so it’s time to choose a new book. Here are the choices, with synopses via Goodreads.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, 1980 (would be a first time read for Freddie)
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. (“Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.”) But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso - who mistakes him for a vagrant - and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next.
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, 1958
A simple story of a “strong man” whose life is dominated by fear and anger, Things Fall Apart is written with remarkable economy and subtle irony. Uniquely and richly African, at the same time it reveals Achebe’s keen awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places.
The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 1: 1989-2000, Nicole Dieker, 2017 (would be a first time read for Freddie)
The Biographies of Ordinary People is the story of the Gruber family: Rosemary and Jack, and their daughters Meredith, Natalie, and Jackie. The two-volume series begins in July 1989, on Rosemary's thirty-fifth birthday; it ends in November 2016, on Meredith's thirty-fifth birthday…. The story is an episodic, ensemble narrative that takes us into intimately familiar experiences: putting on a play, falling out with a best friend, getting dial-up internet for the first time. Drinking sparkling wine out of a paper cup on December 31, 1999 and wondering what will happen next.
The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro, 2015
“You've long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it's time now to think on it anew. There's a journey we must go on, and no more delay...” The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years. Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.
Burning Chrome, William Gibson, 1986 (short story collection)
Ten cyberpunk tales, from the computer-enhanced hustlers of Johnny Mnemonic to the technofetishist blues of Burning Chrome.
Follow this link for a poll where you can vote on the choices. I will honor the vote, with the caveat that if it’s very close I give myself the right to tilt the results. (I’m a scoundrel.) Last time I was dinged by a couple people for saying which I preferred, potentially swinging the votes, so I will keep my own vote private. However, I can sincerely say I’d be thrilled to do any of these. Obviously, I would appreciate it if you would take a moment to investigate the options with those Goodreads links above before voting, and please vote only once. Substack does not have its own internal polls feature yet, and there’s nothing stopping you from cheating by having people who don’t read this newsletter vote, or otherwise mucking around, but… why would you?
If you’re a subscriber and you haven’t yet participated in the book clubs, I really urge you to check it out. We have a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to get reading fiction again if it’s been awhile. If you aren’t a subscriber and this sounds interesting, you know what to do. Book Club content is subscriber only, but as an enticement I’ll make the first one open to anybody and link to it from a main newsletter post.
Second bit of business. I briefly was blogging my way through The Dawn of Everything, not a formal book club per se but just me going through the text and sharing my thoughts as I went, as well as hearing from commenters. I ended up stopping after three or four posts though because, well, I really have a problem with that book’s evidence and citation standards. I tend to be pretty forgiving about such things, but I just found the whole enterprise irresponsible. (I did finish the book, for what it’s worth.) I might write about it, I dunno.
However, people really responded well to me blogging through a big nonfiction tome, so I’m going to be doing so in the Book Club section with Daniel Damrosch’s 2006 book The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. There’s no particular rhyme or reason as to why I’m choosing this book, other than that I’m really interested in it. My intention is to casually blog it chapter by chapter and hopefully post a couple times a week. I expect to start this weekend. I hope you enjoy.
I voted!
As an aside, I've always felt that the story behind the writing of "Confederacy Of, Dunces" was much better than the book itself. Seems like that, could be an entire book club category in itself.
A bunch of those sound interesting--I voted for Burning Chrome mostly because I think it would be fun to switch things up with a short story compilation rather than a novel.