Book Club

[habia]

I've read only five books by Gibson (the Neuromancer trilogy, Burning Chrome, and Virtual Light). I think his prose is really good, especially in Neuromancer.

His prose is great. I admire him more though for the way he views and describes technology in relation to humans.

Neuromancer especially though really draws me into his world of gritty, futuristic "lo life hi tech."

Burning Chrome is great. In particular I like that one story about "edge" researchers and the go-between who treat these genius scientists as commodities.

Got to meet him and shake his hand once. Go me!

i would like to be involved in this if that is ok. my only suggestion is not to get too heavily academic. i think The Prince and Brothers Karamazov and stuff like that is better suited to the university than the sufu.

so is the idea to just let the next person in line pick the book?

What about SUFU Uni?

I agree with others saying let the next person choose the book based on his/her own criteria. Hopefully this will give us a decent level of diversity.

which ones? ive read all of them except Kafka on the Shore, which i am starting now. id be interested to discuss his works, i wouldnt mind re-reading some of the stories. Should we carry this onto the Murakami thread?

Norwegian Wood, Wind Up Bird Chronicles and Underground. Combination of cyberPUNK, Datasupa's avatar and recent New Yorker article of his made me finally check his books out.

Wind Up Bird Chronicle I enjoyed, but feel I missed something... likely due to reading ten page sections on buses and trains- a method which would better suit Underground.

Murakami thread here

http://www.superfuture.com/supertalk/showthread.php?t=35854

Lolita is a great choice. Something I have been meaning to read but have wondered how much I would get out of it on my own. Missed the opportunity when a few friends all read it three summers ago.

and I agree with "Land Ho" about taking notes. Something which is a bit of an inconvenience in the moment but I always highly value it in retrospect. Avast

August 4th. Sounds good.

[fallen angels]

this sounds pretty good, i'll try to get a copy of Lolita asap. u gotta take notes! i feel like i'm in school again.

FA, link me to the Murakami thread.

old thread: http://www.superfuture.com/supertalk/showthread.php?t=35854

[broneck]

wow, i feel like i'm back in the english program I failed out of ! except with enjoyment !

[landho]

In order to keep this thread alive, should we post interesting things we note and our thoughts as we go along? In order to reduce the possibilty of spoiling, we could do something like

SPOILER ALERT (CHAPTER 3)

or something like that.

I am just wondering whether we should note and discuss as we go along or whether we should save it all up for August 4.

[broneck]

I for one am good with discussing throughout the month, I'm sure the bolded spoiler alert would be appreciated as well.

[cjbreed]

^^yeah i definitely think it is good to discuss as you go along. the bold chapter number in the subject line is a good idea, too.

i think most book clubs discuss chapter by chapter or section by section...

also, will we include non-fiction?

[Charlie Delta]

This is a great idea, unfortunatly I still have so much stuff to read for summer, I don't think I can participate.

Would it be an option to join in later?

[cjbreed]

^^just join! and put that other stuff on hold. it is fun to have people to talk to about the book you're reading. your other books will still be there. right?

[landho]

^^yeah i definitely think it is good to discuss as you go along. the bold chapter number in the subject line is a good idea, too.

i think most book clubs discuss chapter by chapter or section by section...

also, will we include non-fiction?

I think this will be at the discretion of the person whose turn it is.

[broneck]

non-fiction should probably be chosen with discretion, I'd hate to read a Michael Moore book (not that anyone here would suggest that) and have the book club spin out of control as a left vs. right debate (not that we're not all civil human beings!). other than that, I dont see why not.

Cotton - dive in, if you're swamped with literature at the moment join us next month.

[landho]

non-fiction should probably be chosen with discretion, I'd hate to read a Michael Moore book (not that anyone here would suggest that) and have the book club spin out of control as a left vs. right debate (not that we're not all civil human beings!). other than that, I dont see why not.

What about just applying the basic SuFu rule of no politics, no religion to the book club as well? Shouldn't be an issue to most members, I think, but just as a general rule of thumb.

[broneck]

lets forget i said anything, because i wouldn't want to restrict conversation on a book such as the Satanic Verses, if we ever ended up reading that.

[broneck]

So after being about 40 pages in, this already strikes me as a good choice...considering it was written in the 50s the language is extremely...anachronistic? (that works, I think). I usually find it difficult to glean humour from texts written like this (Shakespeare was a comedian, though I never really knew it) but this book is hilarious, and Nabokov paints fantastic images with his words.

Chapter 8 -

" 'Mais qui est-ce!' I shouted at last, striking her on the knee with my fist; and she, without even wincing, stared at me as though the answer were too simple for words, then gave a quick shrug and pointed at the thick neck of the taxi driver."

[landho]

So after being about 40 pages in, this already strikes me as a good choice...considering it was written in the 50s the language is extremely...anachronistic? (that works, I think). I usually find it difficult to glean humour from texts written like this (Shakespeare was a comedian, though I never really knew it) but this book is hilarious, and Nabokov paints fantastic images with his words.

I think the word you are looking for is "baroque."

Will begin Lolita this weekend!

[cjbreed]

lets forget i said anything, because i wouldn't want to restrict conversation on a book such as the Satanic Verses, if we ever ended up reading that.

i guess we can just use good sense and give feedback, like if someone suggests The God Delusion, we can collectively decide if that opens too big a can of worms or not...

[grilled cheese]

I can't be down right now but I wish you guys well on your endeavor. You'll hear from me in the not-too-distant future.

[Yardsale]

sign me up. I've got two copies of lolita but its been ages since I read it.

[cinderella]

I AM IN PLS??????/ (PLEASE no one pick satanic verses, I have tried to finish that book 1 million times and I can't do it!!)

[weirdnjfan1]

I want in for the next one that's for sure, considering that I'm in the middle of three books right now.

[broneck]

cinderella and yardsale added to the list for Lolita.

[m1sterko]

yooo, can i join still?

seen the movie, not the novel.

[broneck]

updated the list...this is expanding rapidly (like kristie alley)

[cinderella]

you should perhaps cap membership, or actively cut people who arent interested in the future because the list is getting lonnnnng!

[broneck]

it's the internet...can i cap membership?

[pantheist]

i'll be reading along either way, dunno if you capped the list yet.

[landho]

Foreword

I've read Lolita a few times before, but I feel as if my powers of close reading have grown significantly since the last time I read it.

Nabokov is a master craftsman, and he writes nothing unintentionally. He wrote his novels in pencil on 3-x-5-inch index cards, one sentence to each card. This way he could readily edit his sentences and also reorganize them more easily. (His wife, Vera, would the type them up into manuscript form.)

Everything that John Ray (the fictional writer of the foreword) writes in the foreword has a purpose, and our understanding of Lolita would be furthered if we paid careful attention to what he says. None of the names mentioned--which at this point read like a laundry list of random names--is irrelevent, and it would behoove us to check back periodically for cross-referencing. (Of course, the book is so labrynthine that crosds-referencing within the novel itself would basically require a concordance.)

Also worth noting is the fact that "Humbert Humbert" is a pseudonym, as are many of the names of the characters in the text. Also, HH wrote the book while in prison, finishing it just before he died. This implies that he wrote it without the help of an editor and without being able to refer to earlier sections that he completed, so this is a prodigious accomplishment (and which explains the weird temporal lapse during parts of the book, such as his mistaking "Our Glass Lake" for "Hourglass Lake" but not noting it till chapters later).

We should also consider very seriously HH's unreliability as a narrator. So everything in Lolita should be read carefully, as inconsistencies in HH's story may reveal more than what he tells us straight up.

[landho]

I am just noting some of the things I notice on this reading. Hopefully, as more people in the Super Book Klub read Lolita, they will post things of interest, too, and a more in-depth discussion will ensue.

Chapter 3

"Annabel Leigh" is an obvious reference to Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Annabel Lee," which concerns two children who loved each other "in a kingdom by the sea" and ends with Annabel's death.

More importantly, HH's use of this allusion and pseudonym in so blatant a manner underscores the artifice underpinning the manuscript. HH's background should also be questioned, as the parallels between his childhood and Poe's poem are a bit too striking.

Chapter 5

"At first I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do...."

Emphasizes Nabokov's famous contempt for Freud, but more interestingly, also questions the credibility of Dr. John Ray's foreword, which questioned the credibility of HH's manuscript. So you have two parts of the text that both undermine the authenticity of the other.

[broneck]

In regards to Chapter 3, and his apparent plagiarism of another story...would you suggest he's rationalizing his demons to the reader, or to himself? for whom has he conjured/appropriated this tale of young lust?

[landho]

In regards to Chapter 3, and his apparent plagiarism of another story...would you suggest he's rationalizing his demons to the reader, or to himself? for whom has he conjured/appropriated this tale of young lust?

Well, we should definitely draw a distinction between Nabokov and HH, but I think that Nabokov is making fun of the facile way that psychologists explain sociopathic behavior. HH, who shares Nabokov's contempt for psychologists, is "writing under observation" (as noted in chapter 2) and so may be simply including an easy explanation for his very specific form of pedophilia.

I'm not saying that HH's account of his childhood is necessarily false, but I am trying to stress that we should approach HH's account with some degree of skepticism. "Annabel Leigh" is obviously a pseudonym, and whether he actually loved a young girl by the beach of his father's hotel is not as important, I don't think, as the possibility of his lying.

I think the novel is best enjoyed as a truthful and straightforward account in which HH's playfulness makes itself manifest in the text, but we eventually run into some problems--for example, "Vivian Darkbloom" is an anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov," and this and other things like it undermine the self-contained world of HH's manuscript. ("Mr. Taxovich" in chapter 8 is another [this time hilarious] pseudonym.)

I don't think there is any way to tell whether the majority of Lolita "happened" in the self-contained world of the novel, but I definitely think that HH's unreliability as a narrator is part of what makes Lolita so rich and rereadable.

[broneck]

Cinderella dropped out. Douche.

Landho, you've reminded me why I dropped out of English. As much as I enjoy the analysis and close examination, and all of the possible ways of interpreting and reading a text like Lolita, my melon just doesn't work the way yours does.

I don't think there is any way to tell whether the majority of Lolita "happened" in the self-contained world of the novel

I struggle with this...but I love the absurdity of it, the possibility that what we assume to be a fictional account may not be entirely accurate or truthful...while we've been given ample reason to mistrust (as demonstrated through the use of pseudonyms and his yanrs spun from memory...his word for word recounting of his diary in particular is extremely suspect), what reason has our narrator been given to lie?

Nabokov's license with reality and truth is interesting, and reflects in contemporary works I've recently enjoyed, such as American Psycho or even Pan's Labyrinth.