Book Club: Suggestions for August

[abbey]

Before suggesting anything, please go over the format for suggestions (http://forums.explosm.net/showpost.php?p=373884&postcount=2).

You are free to suggest a book that was suggested last month, but if it didn't get in the poll last time, it probably won't this time.

Also, don't bother suggesting books that are longer than 350 pages. We want to make it easy for people to read these books in one month, so we have to have a limit on length.

If you find one of the suggested books interesting, post about it. The more people who show interest in a book here, the more likely it will be in the poll!

[spyguy]

Title: And Then There Were None
Author: Agatha Christie
Genre: Mystery
Pages:275

First, there were ten-a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of the em, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal-and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. One by one they fall prey. With no way off the island, they desperately try to uncover the murderer before its too late. (Synopsis found on the back of the St. Martin's version of the book).

Via amazon.com: Agatha Christie's AND THEN THERE WERE NONE should be very close to the top of any mystery fan's "must read list." The novel concerns a group of ten previously unacquainted people who are lured via various pretexts to Indian Island, a resort home off the coast of Devon--and are promptly accused by their unseen host of having escaped punishment for past crimes. Cut off from the world and fighting rising panic, they scramble to unmask the killer even as their number is reduced in macabre accordance with the "Ten Little Indians" nursey rhyme displayed in rooms throughout the house.

Agatha Christie was already famous when AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (also known under the title TEN LITTLE INDIANS) was published--but this book put her career well over the top: nothing like it had seen before, it proved a sensation, and writers and film-makers continue to use Christie's basic idea to this very day. Some critics argue the novel is mechanical rather than organic, but I say if this is mechanical, let's have more of it! It is truly a can't-put-it-down, non-stop read, a spectacular turn by the genre's single most celebrated author.

[4cE]

Title: The Pearl
Author: John Steinbeck
Genre: Novella
Pages: 132 (original)

Synopsis:
Kino is a poor Mexican pearl diver. When his baby, Coyotito, is stung by a scorpion, he fears that he may not make it. One day, when diving, he finds a huge pearl he knows to be worth a lot of money. At first, to him and his wife Juana, the pearl seems like a blessing. But as the book progresses, it's greatness is questioned. After he finds the pearl, life for Kino and his family becomes more complicated.

Reviews:

buildingrainbows.com:
This book is amazing! John Steinbeck did a fantastic job grabbing the readers attention. This story is about a man named Kino whose family and himself were very poor until luck have struck him. He had come across the pearl of the world. A pearl so beautiful had to give him great luck. But all it brought was evil. You must read this book and find out for yourself how Kino survived the pearl of the world!

amazon.com:
Referring to this novella, as a variant is in no way meant to detract from the work, or suggest that it is lacking in originality. The two other works Steinbeck's book "The Pearl" is sometimes linked to, add to the reading experience, and reinforce the transcendence of its message.

"The Pearl Of Great Price" from a parable in the Gospel of Matthew, attempts to teach with the same jewel from the sea. Mr. Steinbeck was also a great reader of medieval texts, and one of these morality plays was in the form of a poem written in the 14th Century, entitled "Pearl" although the Author is unknown. These three works are separated by millennia, but their commentary on the human condition is consistent.

Mr. Steinbeck wrote this after his triumph "The Grapes Of Wrath". The work was a monumental bestseller, it brought The Pulitzer Prize to the Author, and was rapidly made into a movie that is a classic in it's own right. Superficially one could argue Mr. Steinbeck achieved all that a writer might conceivably want, fame, fortune, and critical recognition.

Unfortunately, like his work, often when you feel something good is about to happen, a positive change for his characters that have struggled, and fought to survive, he slams you face down on bedrock's reality. The acclaim for his work brought him great discomfort as well. He was labeled a socialist, a communist, an agitator, and became the focus of FBI attention, and not because they liked his book. He viewed and detested the treatment the racism toward Mexicans in Southern California, and witnessed the so-called "Zoot Suit Riots" that resulted.

"The Pearl" might be called the lottery if it was written today. The ticket that vaults a person from the troubles of day-to-day life, and is thought to leave them "set for life" all too often is a quick financial ride up and a crash back down.

Sudden wealth when thrust upon a person, changes the person, and everyone around them. All their reference points, their friends, and all that their lives have not prepared them for, surround, threaten, and many times destroy them.

This book is very brief, but it communicates as much as a novel 10 times its length. The ending is brilliant, tragic, and redemptive. It is a story that few could write, and even fewer could make work. The emotional scenes he brings the reader to are at times almost violent in there reading. And then with a turn of phrase he can change the mood time and time again.

A wonderful novella from an Author known for sweeping sagas.

[tunacake]

Title: Snuff
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 208

Synopsis: (From Amazon)
Palahniuk's audacious ninth novel tells the story of Cassie Wright, an aging porn queen who intends to put an exclamation point on her career by having sex with 600 men in one day on film. The story begins with Mr. 600—the pornosaur who introduced Cassie to the business—as he describes the other 599 actors awaiting their moment on screen. The perspective then shifts to Mr. 72, an adopted Midwestern 20-something who is one of the many young men claiming to be Cassie's long-lost son. Mr. 137, a has-been television star hoping to revive his career, wants to ask Cassie's hand in marriage so that the two can star in a reality TV show. But for a novel centered around a gargantuan gangbang, there's surprisingly little action; the small amount of narrative movement takes place backstage, where the characters attempt to get a sense of one another while waiting for their number to be called. There are sharp moments when Palahniuk compassionately and candidly examines the flesh-on-film industry, but mostly this reads like a cross between the Spice Channel and Days of Our Lives.

I'm a little ways into it and I'm liking it so far.

[kussese]

Title: The Dante Club
Author: Mathew Pearl
Pages: 367
Genre: Literary Mystery

Synopsis: Boston, 1865. A series of murders, all of them inspired by scenes in Dante's Inferno. Only an elite group of America's first Dante scholars -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and J.T. Fields -- can solve the mistery. With the police baffled, more lives endangered, and Dante's literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find the killer.

Note: It isn't necessary to have read The Divine Comedy in order to read this book (Pearl explains it as the plot unfolds), but I found it helpful to read the summary on Wikipedia.

Edit: Ignore this, I skimmed over the part that said shorter than 350.

[annamckagan]

Title: The Bald Soprano
Author: Eugene Ionesco
Genre: Theatre of the absurd
Pages: less than 100 pages

Synopsis:

The Bald Soprano, Ionesco's first play, was inspired by his attempt to teach himself English from a primer of the “See Dick and Jane” variety. As Ionesco read and copied the primer's banal truisms and clichés (“The ceiling is up”), each apparently innocuous sentence came to seem increasingly uncanny and enigmatic. The play was intended to convey this experience of a disintegration of language.
The Smiths are a traditional couple from London, who have invited another couple, the Martins, over for a visit. They are joined later by the Smiths' maid, Mary, and the local fire chief, who is also a friend and possibly former lover of Mary's. The two families engage in meaningless banter, telling stories and relating nonsensical poems. Mrs. Martin at one point converses with her husband as if he were a stranger she just met. As the fire chief turns to leave, he mentions "the bald soprano" in passing, which has a very unsettling effect on the others. Mrs Smith replies that "she always wears her hair in the same style."

Like many plays in the theatre of the absurd genre, the underlying theme of The Bald Soprano is not immediately apparent. Many suggest that it expresses the futility of meaningful communication in modern society. The script is charged with non sequiturs that give the impression that the characters are not even listening to each other in their frantic efforts to make their own voices heard. There was speculation around the time of its first performance, categorising it as a parody. Ionesco states in an essay written to his critics, that he had no intention of parody, but if he were parodying anything, it would be everything.

[tunacake]

Anna that's a little short for this but I'm intrigued. That's going on my list.