CP LITERATURE DRAFT - (Rapid Fire Free For All Round)

[Eastern Girl]

Oh crud, my pick again. I will take a few to think of what I would like to pick, should be up soon.

[Eastern Girl]

I would like to select in the category of Memoir/Biography #1 (as I have two in this category), Marley and Me by John Grogan.



This book chronicles a mans time with his beloved dog, Marley, who he dubbed, 'The World Worst Dog.' This is a must read for doggie lovers, or anyone who has had a dog that could not be tamed, but was just too lovable that you almost didn't care.

A friend recommended this book a few months after my doggie had been put down. She said it would make me smile and feel better about losing my dog. It did, but it also made me cry like a baby. It's one of only two books that's ever brought me to tears.

Either way, a fantastic book and a definite great read.

[FanIn80]

For my next pick, using up my second Fantasy category...

The Eyes of the Dragon, by Stephen King.

The Eyes of the Dragon is a book by Stephen King published in 1987. Previously, it was published as a limited edition hardcover by Philtrum Press in 1984. The mass-market version had been slightly revised for publication. At the time it was a surprising deviation from the norm for King, who is best known for his horror fiction. This book is a work of classic fantasy, with a clearly established battle between good and evil, with magic playing a lead role.

[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

For my next pick, using up my second Fantasy category...

Do you mean your wildcard?

Or did I miss recording a trade?

[flip]

I'm not usually interested in the Drafts, other than the inaugural hottie draft but I've now gone thru all 12 pages. My thoughts:

Most of my faves have been chosen: Heart of Darkness, 1984, Great Gatsby, Fight Club, Watchmen.

Aeneas, you can't be serious about only liking Stardust and no other graphic novels. Not only is 300 an excellent graphic novel compared to the movie but the medium is chalk full of stuff FAR better than Stardust. You can get any number of really good works by Gaiman if you like his stuff already, specifically Sandman and Marvel 1602.

I'd also check out Preacher, Kingdom Come, Marvels and the already drafted Watchmen. They all bridge serious work with superheroes and aren't "childish" like many works can be.

I'd also check out anything by Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale. Their work was the inspiration for both of the recent Batman movies, along with Frank Miller's Batman Year One and the Dark Knight Returns.

Keep it up guys I might actually try and read a few of these during the semester break if I can find time in between my binge drinking and drug abuse (half kidding, I like to party when on break from Uni).

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by Bobblehead

Do you mean your wildcard?

Or did I miss recording a trade?

Yep, I did it again. I really need to start paying more attention to my picks...

I had offered three trades, but the Fantasy one was never responded to. Sorry!

[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Yep, I did it again. I really need to start paying more attention to my picks...

I had offered three trades, but the Fantasy one was never responded to. Sorry!

No problem, I just want to make sure I put it in the correct spot. It won't affect my (imminent) pick, so maybe you have time to grab another Fantasy slot. I know there were a few more people offering theirs up, and I already have a few to fill.

[Bobblehead]

For my 3rd Round pick, in the Scientific category, I choose Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask--but Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life--from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing--and his conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. The authors show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives--how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In this book, they set out to explore the hidden side of everything. If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work.

Being an Economics graduate, this is exactly the type of stuff that interests me. Economics is a social science. It tries to figure out why we do what we do, and many times that means trying to figure out why what happened happened when it did.

This book is something anyone can read, and has proven to generate more than a little bit of controversy, especially with the results of the Guns vs Swimming pools and Violent crime vs Roe v Wade. It isn't the final answer in these topics, but does give some interesting relationships.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/
http://www.amazon.ca/Freakonomics-St...8255501&sr=8-1

[octothorp]

I'm curious to know what others thought of Marley & Me. My parents got it for my wife and I when we got a dog. She read it. Hated it. I read it (well, half of it). Hated it. I've heard a lot of people sing its praises including people who's critical opinions I respect, but for me, it did nothing. Maybe I'm just too cold-hearted.

[flip]

Originally Posted by octothorp

I'm curious to know what others thought of Marley & Me. My parents got it for my wife and I when we got a dog. She read it. Hated it. I read it (well, half of it). Hated it. I've heard a lot of people sing its praises including people who's critical opinions I respect, but for me, it did nothing. Maybe I'm just too cold-hearted.

And it is now being made into a heinous looking movie with Owen "I can't do anything right" Wilson and Jenifer Aniston.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0822832/

[FanIn80]

I've just traded my Anthology/Short Story pick to EasternGirl for her Fantasy category.

I'll be moving my previous pick back into the Fantasy category now.

(Thanks again Bobblehead!)

[driveway]

With my third round pick, Team Discovery Channel is proud to select, in the category of Science:



On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

or,

The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

By Charles Darwin.

Published 24 November, 1859
Title changed to The Origin of Species in 1872.

Arguably the most important book ever published, and unquestionably the most important work of biology. The 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species rocked the scientific, religious, and popular world simultaneously.

No book has sparked more ferocious debate, nor (with the possible exceptions of Newton's Principia Mathematica and Einstein's papers on General and Special Relativity) been the basis for more scientific discovery.

One of the first scientific treatise to be readable by the non-expert, this book forever altered our understanding of our place in the universe.

Being raised by an evolutionary biologist, I was drilled young in the importance of this work and have read it twice - once haltingly when in my early to mid teens, and again in my early twenties. I definitely got more out of it the second time, having by then read other works from the period and being more prepared for victorian diction, but it is not a hard read and - even if you choose not to accept the conclusions - the book deserves to be read by everyone the world over.


Natural Selection in a nutshell:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

[Eastern Girl]

I really liked Marley and Me. Most of the people I know that read it, liked it as well. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

I just recently saw a poster of the movie, but I doubt I'll be seeing it.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by driveway

With my third round pick, Team Discovery Channel is proud to select, in the category of Science:

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

or,

The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

By Charles Darwin.

Darwin's 200th birthday is in February:

http://www.darwinday.org/

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Nice pick, driveway. That was at the top of my list for that category.

[rogermexico]

Woah, that was fast. I'll have a pick in an hour or so...

[Aeneas]

Originally Posted by flip

I'm not usually interested in the Drafts, other than the inaugural hottie draft but I've now gone thru all 12 pages. My thoughts:


Aeneas, you can't be serious about only liking Stardust and no other graphic novels. Not only is 300 an excellent graphic novel compared to the movie but the medium is chalk full of stuff FAR better than Stardust. You can get any number of really good works by Gaiman if you like his stuff already, specifically Sandman and Marvel 1602.


Keep it up guys I might actually try and read a few of these during the semester break if I can find time in between my binge drinking and drug abuse (half kidding, I like to party when on break from Uni).

I didn't say I only liked Stardust, I said it is the only Graphic novel I have read or own. So it had to be my choice. I have never read "300", and said I wouldn't be interested due to the movie. That may be unfair on my part, however I have a massive number of books waiting to be read, that there is just no room for something that does not interest me.

The battle of Thermopylae does interest me, but if I want to read about it I will stick to history texts or Steven Pressfields "Gates Of Fire" not a graphic novel.

[rogermexico]

Alright, for my third pick, in the World Literature category, I pick The Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges.



This particular book from Penguin has every story that Borges ever wrote. All of them. I've seen some reviews knock the translation in this particular edition but frankly I don't speak Spanish and would have no idea if I was reading a good or bad translation. I do know that having all the stories from one of my favorite writers together in one big book is really handy. The chronological presentation lets you really get the feel for how this man redeveloped the entire idea of what a short story is and what it can accomplish. By the time you get into the middle - Ficciones and The Aleph - you're really reading stories unlike anything you've ever encountered.

Anyone who likes mysteries, Vikings, HP Lovecraft, mazes, puzzles, Phillip K Dick, Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, the Arabian Nights, or just great short stories in general will love Borges' work.

There's also similar editions which collect all of Borges' poetry and non-fiction. The non-ficiton collection is also fantastic.

[habernac]

it is my pleasure to select, in the Children's Lit category, the Roch Carrier classic: The Hockey Sweater



A timeless tale of a boy growing up a Canadiens and Rocket Richard fan. Much to his horror, his new hockey sweater from Eaton's is a Leafs jersey instead of his cherished #9 of le Bleu Blanc et Rouge. If you can fins it, our very own LA Flames Fan did a terrifc modern day spoof of it on video.

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

In the category of European Lit, Bartleby and the Scriveners are pleased to select Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.




We're very pleased to have been able to select this work by an author whose work is so iconic that it spawned an adjective: Kafkaesque. His bleak novels have a dark, nightmarish quality, often situating his narrators in surreal, peculiar circumstances with no way out. Kafka himself was a virtual shut-in, suffering from too many medical ailments to name, and died in relative obscurity without seeing much of his work in print. Even his own death was darkly ironic: he died of starvation, having been rendered unable to eat by a throat infection. Upon his death, his executor Max Brod had been instructed to burn his books; Brod did not comply with Kafka's wish, and thus a new genre of darkly modern, surreal fiction was born.

The Metamorphosis is Kafka's most famous work, and also his only finished novel (though some call it a novella). It tells the story of Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect. In that sense, The Metamorphosis is not about a transformation at all, since that transformation has already taken place, if you want to be technical. However, we learn very quickly that Gregor's life has been that of a "bug" for a long time, and as his physical appearance becomes more monstrous, his inner life takes on newfound richness as he finally frees himself from the grips of his equally monstrous (though in their case psychologically) family. Gregor dies grotesquely, from an abscessed, infected piece of fruit lodged in his shell, and he is taken out with the trash, quite notably unmourned by a family that had begun to see him as a burden. The reader is left to wonder: who is/was the burden here? Who the parasite? Indeed, his family exults vampirically upon Gregor's death, having feasted, as it were, on his flesh and discarded his dessicated remains. Ominously, in the final sentence, Gregor's parents turn their parasitic eyes toward their one surviving daughter:

All the time, Grete was becoming livelier. With all the worry they had been having of late her cheeks had become pale, but, while they were talking, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa were struck, almost simultaneously, with the thought of how their daughter was blossoming into a well built and beautiful young lady. They became quieter. Just from each other's glance and almost without knowing it they agreed that it would soon be time to find a good man for her. And, as if in confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions, as soon as they reached their destination Grete was the first to get up and stretch out her young body.