Yeah, you’ll have to set dates like “This is the day we decide on a book,” “This is the day you have to be done reading,” etc. If people are going to suggest stupid **** like that manga, which I’m hoping was a fakepost, just decide things. If I like this book, I’ll bumume your further decisions are cool and input suggestions. But if the typical FWZ majority takes over I won’t want to participate, personally.

Let’s do Pynchon and read it until the end of May. That’s long enough even if you don’t already have it. It has only about 200 pages, but it took me longer than other books.

The Unknown Comic Posted:

Oh, ****, I guess I should’ve been more clear. Well, Aldo and Corey said they’d be down for Lot 49. I’m sure some others will be too. If others don’t want to read it this time, maybe we’ll hit it next time or they’ll join in for the next book.

I feel bad now.

Don’t feel bad. Decision making, even accidentally is a good thing. For those on a budget, and who isn’t, it is quite inexpensive on Amazon if it isn’t available at a local library.

This is something I would be interested in, as I enjoy reading for pleasure. I rarely get a chance to discuss the books I read, since the only recreational reading my buddies do is of amine or manga, or **** like that.

The Unknown Comic Posted:

All right, Crying of Lot 49 is the book for May. It can be a quick read, but it can be slow going trying to get a good understanding of what’s going on. If once somebody finishes the book or they want to point out something, ask a question, or quote something particularly good they can make a topic like FWZ Book Club: Crying of Lot 49 *Spoilers* or something. People can join in as they finish.

k cool. Now I just have to go and get a copy.

http://www.innternet.de/~peter.patti/thomaspynchon-thecryingoflot49.htm

—for those of you who are too cheap to buy it

such a trippy book

I’m going to try and get in on the club, but my reading pace has really fallen off lately (doing more side work). I already have Lot 49 so that’s a good enough reason for me to join in.

Fair warning: For those of you who enjoy Lot 49 and are interested in more Pynchon, I’d recommend staying away from Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s one of those novels you kind of have to work towards…very difficult to read at first. My creative writing teacher in high school offered an “A” grade in the clbum to any student who could read it and give a 1 minute summary to her.

Small Gods- Terry Pratchett

Thief of Time- Terry Pratchett

Science of the Discworld 3: Darwin’s Watch- Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen, and Ian Stewart

I’m in. I might not be done with the read this month because ot the exams I have coming up, but I’ll give it a shot.

Here’s a few ideas for the following months, though:

Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

Written in an episodic, snapshot manner, the novel has 155 chapters, the last 99 being designated as “expendable.” The book can be read either in direct sequence from chapter 1 to 56, which, Cortázar writes, the reader can do “with a clean conscience”, or by hopscotching through the entire set of 155 chapters—except chapter 55—according to a table provided by the author that leaves the reader, finally, in an infinite loop between the last two chapters in the sequence. There are several other ways to read the novel, such as reading only the odd or even pages, or choosing chapters in completely random order. Some of the “expendable” chapters fill in gaps in the main story, while others add information about the characters or record the aesthetic and literary speculations of a writer named Morelli (possibly a stand-in for the author) who makes a brief appearance in the narrative. The novel is also considered to belong in the genre of Latin American magical realism and is an example of multiple endings.

John Dies at the End by David Wong (I have this in .doc format if you don’t own it and the Amazon price is out of your league)

Comedic horror novel, John Dies at the End follows the two protagonists, John and Dave, two slobs from an undisclosed town in the American Midwest, as they’re dragged into a number of paranormal adventures in which the world is at stake. It really is cooler than it sounds.

One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I don’t even know how to start talking about this one; it’s a family history and a town history, written in an objective, but parodic manner and pretty much one of my favorite books of all-time. The generations change and each is as fascinating as the previous, while it repeats the mistakes of old. Two of the more important themes of the book are the subjectiveness of reality and the circularity of history, as a whole.

The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa

The most important part of this book has got to be the use of multiple perspectives, to the point that identifying the narrator is virtually impossible in any given part of the book during the first read. It’s a story of a military high school and a scale model of the Peruvian society, a mystery and a tale that rivals The king of the flies at some points.

The storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

A return to a time of myth, melded with fragments of modern-day society. The story of a fragmented tribe in the Amazonian rainforest and its mythology and that of an outcast of the modern-day Peruvian society.

Nostalgia by Mircea Cartarescu

The novel consists of five distinct parts which bumiduously link together to produce a narrative that is on the one hand disjointed and on the other produces, as a whole, a kind of hidden center while negotiation the Romanian relationship to time and place, state and nationalism, communism and community, the rural and the capital with a neurotic, hallucinatory fervor that itself seems an exhalation of all of these anxieties, breathed through the lungs of Romania’s leading poet. As Laura Savu puts it in World Literature in Review, “His intellectual fervor, dazzling linguistic play, and visceral prose…often touch a cultural nerve.”

Edit: Added descriptions to each book.

May 30th sounds like a good date to me.

I’ll also re-suggest Lamb by Christopher Moore. A great book that I really want to discuss intelligently.