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Old 11-26-2008, 10:08 PM   #181
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We've gotta be close to an AK'ing in this draft now...
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Old 11-26-2008, 10:18 PM   #182
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Eastern Girl View Post
We've gotta be close to an AK'ing in this draft now...
Yep--it's over 24 hours now. Where did we leave it on the proposal to AK after 12?
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Old 11-26-2008, 11:01 PM   #183
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With the 38th overall pick in the draft, RatherDashings "24 CCs of Heart" select in the Canadian Lit Category, Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood.





Oryx and Crake is a novel about two young men growing up in a dystopian future. The story is split between two different timelines. One relates the story of "Snowman", an individual who seems to be the last man on earth following the apocalypse. The other telling the story of Jimmy and Glenn, two boys growing up in a world dominated by giant corporations that operate secured town-sized compounds that isolate their employees from the rest of the world.

Margaret Atwood explores a number of issues in this book, primarily the ethics of genetic engineering and the limits of commercialization. She also does a very good job of exploring the what ifs of genetic engineering.

This is another book that I really enjoyed reading. I found it to be quite easy to read, and the excellent pacing and character development kept me interested throughout. All in all, this book should be a must read for anybody who enjoys either dystopian or speculative science novels.


I'm hoping it's okay to post this. It's been 24 hours, and I wanted to get this up because I may have trouble getting onto a computer tomorrow. Anyways, hopefully I didn't snipe garypowers' pick with this one.

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Old 11-27-2008, 12:12 AM   #184
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Damnit! Another of my picks gone... GOOD book, great pick.
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Old 11-27-2008, 01:27 AM   #185
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ah, honestly my favorite Atwood book. She can be a great distopian writer.
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Old 11-27-2008, 07:08 AM   #186
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Damn, that was a pick of mine... great book.
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Old 11-27-2008, 08:47 AM   #187
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That's #1, 2, and 3 of my Canadian choices gone. Might have to trade that category.
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Old 11-27-2008, 08:47 AM   #188
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I select in the American Lit category, the book Hemingway called "the best book we've had", ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, by Mark Twain (1884).

I read this book in high school, and no other book remains so vivid in my mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventu...ckleberry_Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (often shortened to Huck Finn) is a novel written by American humoristMark Twain. It is commonly used and accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It is also one of the first major American novels written using Local Color Regionalism, or vernacular, told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer and hero of three other Mark Twain books.

The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. By satirizingSouthernantebellum society that was already a quarter-century in the past by the time of publication, the book is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. The drifting journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on their raft may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature.



Twain wrote a novel that embodies the search for freedom. He wrote during the post-Civil War period when there was an intense white reaction against blacks. Twain took aim squarely against racial prejudice, increasing segregation, lynchings, and the generally accepted belief that blacks were sub-human. He "made it clear that Jim was good, deeply loving, human, and anxious for freedom."[9]

Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives, and while he is unable to consciously refute those values even in his thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Mark Twain in his lecture notes proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience," and goes on to describe the novel as "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat."[10]
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Old 11-27-2008, 08:52 AM   #189
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Nice pick, trout! Definetely a genre-defining work too--in a very real sense the first book to be written in an "American Vernacular" voice.
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Old 11-27-2008, 08:54 AM   #190
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And there goes my next pick. Nice one troutman.
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Old 11-27-2008, 11:06 AM   #191
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We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.
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Old 11-27-2008, 07:15 PM   #192
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For my next pick, in the category of Fantasy, jammies' Fahrenheit 451 would like to pick the 2nd book of the Lyonesse trilogy by Jack Vance, The Green Pearl.



Published back in 1986, this is (I think) the best book written by one of the best SF/Fantasy writers of the 20th century. It is set in the Elder Isles, a mythical land southwest of Cornwall and west of Brittany, where the grim King Casmir plots to reunite the various petty kingdoms of the Isles under his suzerainty. Casmir is opposed by the protaganist of the first two books, Aillas, who is king in his own right of Troicinet and Dascinet, two lesser islands in the southern part of the Isles, and who is forced by Casmir into trying to match him scheme for scheme lest he be outmanuevered and destroyed.

There is political intrigue, vendetta, great journeys, battles, magicians and most of all, the endlessly inventive dialogue of Vance, who is master at creating memorable voices and characters. The Green Pearl itself, exudate of the last malign purpose of a suicidal witch, is the centre of many of the interweaving stories which make up the book, but along with this evil of the supernatural variety there is the mundane evil of men to overcome, and all along the way the characters express their moral and immoral certainties to illuminate the events and entertain the reader.

I highly recommend this book if you love fantasy, along with Madouc, the third in the trilogy (where the protagonist is the fey-born changeling daughter of Casmir), and Suldrun's Garden, the first (and least, although still very good) of the books, as Vance's distinctive style is both worth experiencing and subtly unlike any other.
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Old 11-28-2008, 10:22 AM   #193
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Team Writer's Block is proud to select a seminal piece of writing, by one of the grandmasters of Sci-Fi/Fantasy Robert Heinlein, Stranger In A Strange Land.



This book is the tale of Valentine Micheal Smith, a child of astronauts who were on a mission to Mars. They all died and the boy was instead "raised" by Martians - he is discovered by the 2nd manned voyage to Mars and returns to Earth, an innocent who has never seen a woman before, heir to a vast fortune and the de-facto ruler of Mars as a result of his habitation there. As Mike learns about humanity from the cohort of people he meets and lives with, he begins to spread his own message. He creates a Church whose main catechism is that everyone & everything is God and that by recognizing that in each other and the world around us, we can get closer to our own God-hood and each other....

From Amazon.com
Stranger in a Strange Land, winner of the 1962 Hugo Award, is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, born during, and the only survivor of, the first manned mission to Mars. Michael is raised by Martians, and he arrives on Earth as a true innocent: he has never seen a woman and has no knowledge of Earth's cultures or religions. But he brings turmoil with him, as he is the legal heir to an enormous financial empire, not to mention de facto owner of the planet Mars. With the irascible popular author Jubal Harshaw to protect him, Michael explores human morality and the meanings of love. He founds his own church, preaching free love and disseminating the psychic talents taught him by the Martians. Ultimately, he confronts the fate reserved for all messiahs.

The impact of Stranger in a Strange Land was considerable, leading many children of the 60's to set up households based on Michael's water-brother nests. Heinlein loved to pontificate through the mouths of his characters, so modern readers must be willing to overlook the occasional sour note ("Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault."). That aside, Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the master's best entertainments, provocative as he always loved to be. Can you grok it?

Quotes from the book:
"He was not in a hurry, "hurry" being one human concept he had failed to grok at all. He was sensitively aware of the key importance of correct timing in all acts — but with the Martian approach: correct timing was accomplished by waiting. He had noticed, of course, that his human brothers lacked his own fine discrimination of time and often were forced to wait a little faster than a Martian would — but he did not hold their innocent awkwardness against them; he simply learned to wait faster himself to cover their lack."
-------------
"My failures are so much more numerous than my successes that I am beginning to wonder if full grokking will show that I am on the wrong track entirely — that this race must be split up, hating each other, fighting each other, constantly unhappy and at war even with their own individual selves… simply to have that weeding out that every race must have."
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Old 11-28-2008, 10:36 AM   #194
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Good pick Jerzee, Heinlein is outstanding, wouldn't be surprised to see a number of his books end up on people's lists.

Lots of Sci-fi, fantasy going early. Good to see CP is loaded with geeks, perhaps why I feel so at home here!

Last edited by driveway; 11-28-2008 at 10:38 AM.
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Old 11-28-2008, 11:04 AM   #195
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Quote:
Originally Posted by driveway View Post
Good pick Jerzee, Heinlein is outstanding, wouldn't be surprised to see a number of his books end up on people's lists.

Lots of Sci-fi, fantasy going early. Good to see CP is loaded with geeks, perhaps why I feel so at home here!
I suspect it's partly that there's a smaller pool of great works to choose from, so people tend to pick theirs early, feeling that they can depend on backups for their other categories.

(Though in fact, now that I look at the board the American lit category has been picked more than any other--so that theory of mine is shot to hell....)
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Old 11-28-2008, 11:16 AM   #196
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Quote:
Originally Posted by driveway View Post
Good pick Jerzee, Heinlein is outstanding, wouldn't be surprised to see a number of his books end up on people's lists.

Lots of Sci-fi, fantasy going early. Good to see CP is loaded with geeks, perhaps why I feel so at home here!
Thanks Driveway - I had to make this pick early....Heinlein is one of my fave authors (ever since I read "Have Spacesuit - Will Travel" back in gr.8) and Stranger is perhaps one of his best and most thought provoking books, certainly it's on my "top 10 books to take to a deserted island" list.

If you haven't read at least some Asimov, Heinlein & Tolkien then you can't really consider yourself a fan of the genre......
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Old 11-28-2008, 11:32 AM   #197
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The Carnies select with their 2nd round pick, in European Lit, the second best book I've ever read:

The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass



Like Catch 22, this book blew me away when I first read it, and I immediately went out and bought a copy of own. After reading it a second time some time later, I became convinced it was a "desert island book," and I am happy to add it to the team.

Some prose about the book, written much better than what I can offer! If it seems disjointed, follow the link provided below- I did a 2 minute cut and paste hack job to trim it down some:

Quote:
The Tin Drum is a stunning read and is the reason why forty years after its release, Grass, praised for his "cheerful destructiveness and creative irreverence," received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A profoundly human tale, The Tin Drum is built from hallucinatory prose and an ability to see the extraordinary that lurks just beneath the surface of the apparently mundane. The story is of a child who decides never to grow past his current height of three feet because the world is such a horrible place, and then experiences many adventures that prove to him that he was simultaneously totally right and totally wrong in his belief. His family believes that his disability was caused by a fall down the cellar stairs, exhibiting "man's understandable desire to find physical justification for all alleged miracles." Never sentimental, Grass shows the child Oskar growing and discovering what it is that makes up life. He is too complex a character to symbolize anyone or anything specific. Sometimes kind, sometimes spoiled, always curious and filled with Freudian sexuality, and sometimes terrible and cruel he may be. But he is always human.

It is immediately apparent that Grass has an enormous capacity to perceive the lightest comedy and the deepest tragedy (both of which are on a thin, often indistinguishable barrier) in the everyday. An undoubted delight in anarchism ("everything is permitted when it is snowing") runs through a book that regards where "there is politics there is violence" so let us have as little of it as possible. By rejecting the good/evil system of thought, Oskar maintains his freedom. Likewise, Grass refuses to demonize the Nazis, to dehumanize them into stock villains as they had the Jews. They were not predestined or predetermined to be evil, it was not the devil or some higher or lower force that possessed them. They were people, ordinary educated people (doctors, university graduates, chicken farmers, greengrocers) who brought evil about consciously through their choices.
http://www.litkicks.com/GunterGrass/
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Old 11-28-2008, 11:40 AM   #198
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Also, I'm looking to acquire some more Euro Lit and Amer Lit if anyone is selling. I realize they are probably hot properties, so I can also take an unwanted category and make it a 2 for 2 kinda deal if need be. I'm open to suggestions. PM away!
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Old 11-28-2008, 11:48 AM   #199
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I as well would like Amer Lit, Can Lit and Euro Lit and can offer a substantially higher value than our dear friend Ro.
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Old 11-28-2008, 11:51 AM   #200
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Ronald Pagan will swindle you, I guarantee it. Do not trust him.

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