Blue Stockings Society

Hey guys,

Sorry I didn't get around to replying to any comments last week -- I was consumed by Kickstarter madness which fried my brain/ate my life and then had to catch up on all my ACTUAL work which then ate up the rest of my week. Anyway, I kind of want to wait to talk about this until... finishing the book, since I don't have too much to say about this but suspect I will once it is over, but here is a post for discussion if you guys have things to say this week -- have at it, etc etc.

Re. Future Books -- I recently got my hands on a copy of Vicious, by V.E. Schwab, while visiting the Tor offices, and it looks pretty great:

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end?

In Vicious, V. E. Schwab brings to life a gritty comic-book-style world in vivid prose: a world where gaining superpowers doesn’t automatically lead to heroism, and a time when allegiances are called into question.

Would this be of interest to people? I think it would be a fun change of pace -- the editor who gave it to me described it as Magneto vs. Magneto fic, which, like, sign me up basically -- and we could do it in probably two weeks at the beginning of December, which would give people time to do Thanksgiving and then Christmas (or whatever holiday business)/Yuletide -- and then maybe dive into another big literary book come January.

Or, of course, we could do something else!

All right, week 2!

I'm still really enjoying reading this and seeing how the plot is beginning to unfold. We notably break structure to move away from Marie-Laure and Werner (and occasionally her father) to be introduced to von Rumpel, and then follow him to the Museum, which has obvious consequences for Marie-Laure's family. How Werner's thread will ultimately fit into what is looking to be the larger narrative is still unclear but I'm guessing it will also tie in in some fashion. I like the more global feel that this gives the book -- of course this (the stone) was going to be a critical piece of the story, but the way Doerr is setting up the story at this point (von Rumpel's search for it, Marie-Laure's father's deportation, her situation in Saint-Malo) has an epic quality to it, which fits in with a raid/bombing really well, I think, as a sort of culminating incident/recurring motif throughout the book. I think it all gives the book something of a folktale quality, as we were discussing last week -- not in a particularly overbearing or explicit way, but it's definitely an element of what is going on, to my mind.

Moving on to bullet points:
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All right, time for the last post on Never Let Me Go, which I hope a few more people will read and then come back to as it is truly SUCH a masterpiece.

I read the whole last section yesterday in one go and by the end I was quite a mess, and then when I went out a little later and no longer had other things to distract me got considerably more worked up once again. I am really in awe of Ishiguro's ability to do this to people with a narrative and prose that is so restrained and, in a way, limited -- of course, this is by design, and very much serves the whole.

I think more than anything from straight off the bat in this section you really see that what Kathy is telling us is not reliable -- not necessarily in the sense that events as recorded did not transpire (I think that, barring moments where she says she's not sure she's remembering something correctly, it's fair to assume everything did happen, although she of course she's interpreting things through a particular lens), but in that the way she's presenting herself and her life to us are not reflective of how she really feels about things, largely because she doesn't want to or can't process how she really feels about things. For instance, right away, on p. 208, she says: "Even the solitude, I've actually grown to like. That's not to say I'm not looking forward to a bit more companionship come the end of the year when I'm finished with all of this." It's perfectly possible that there are elements of the solitude that she appreciates, but this has the distinct ring of somebody trying to convince herself that she really is happy when in fact she isn't really at all. And why would she be?

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Hey folks,

So! Never Let Me Go. I'll start again by giving my ~history with the book (next time whatever we do will be new to me too!) -- I read this in the spring of 2011, when I was studying in Oxford, after I went and saw the film with a couple of friends (I think -- I definitely remember being there with one friend, who loved the book). This friend was really disappointed by the film (which I also thought was pretty middling) because she said it didn't do the book justice, and so I of course then wanted to read it -- she was very emphatic about how much she had loved it, and it sort of went around our little group if I'm remembering correctly (at least one other person read it also).

I have a memory, which may not be entirely accurate (what a thematically appropriate comment), of sitting in the bookstore cafe in Oxford and reading this all in one go -- it may not have been quite the entire book, but if not it was certainly almost the entire thing. I used to go in there, usually after a tutorial was finished, and just read all day (and also sometimes on days when I did not have that excuse), not for school but just whatever I wanted. Anyway I was completely transfixed. And by the time I got to the end this book had MESSED me UP, man, but I'll get to that later. Suffice to say I think it is one of the best things I've ever read and that it has stayed with me in a way that very few things have.

(Also the movie really is crap. EXCEPT FOR THE COSTUMING/SET DESIGN AND ALSO ANDREW GARFIELD. But I will also get to this later.)

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A heads up from emluv :

"Group members in the US might be interested to know that Never Let Me Go is currently 30% off at Powells.com, as part of their 25 Books to Read Before You Die sale."

So, get on that!

Hello everyone! Welcome to our ~humble abode.

In case you haven't ever had an account on a journaling site like this before, communities basically work as you would expect: anybody who is a member can make posts, and if you were actually... using this site in a regular way you would see the post on your friends list, but I'm assuming most/all of you will just be checking this page on discussion weekends. (I think you can maybe do RSS feeds also? But I never use those so I'm not the person to ask about that.) I figure the easiest way to do things will be for me to do a big discussion post at the beginning of the weekend, and then everybody can comment on that, and if people have other long thoughts that they want to make separate posts about they can do that as well.

Moving on to scheduling etc, I am going to basically just c/p what I posted on tumblr so that we have it here for reference:

Scheduling

Our first book will be A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, and the dates for that will be as follows:

--August 22/23: Chapters 1-7 (through p. 102 in the standard US paperback)
--August 29/30: Chapter 8--end (through p. 204)

This breaks exactly in half and IT'S A REALLY GOOD PLACE TO STOP, I am extremely pleased about it. YOU'LL ALL HAVE TO PROMISE NOT TO READ AHEAD.

Places to get the book

Indiebound can connect you to local bookstores that carry the novel in the US. If you are in the UK, you can go through Hive. Hive also sells an EPUB version of the book here. If you want to buy the book used there is always Barnes & Noble but that may take longer to deliver.

THE FUTURE

After A Separate Peace we'll be reading Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I think doing this on the weekends of the 12/13th and 19/20th of September would be good, which leaves a week in-between books. They're pretty short, but obviously if people think that is too quick we can push it off longer. I think gaining some momentum early would be good, though.

After Never Let Me Go, we're going to read The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, which is coming out in early September. This is a much longer book, and we can work out the scheduling when the time comes.

I'll be posting updates and information on tumblr as well as here. But all the actual discussion will take place here.

Very excited about doing this with all of you!