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

[Bobblehead]

In Pulp Fiction, I'll choose The Sum Of All Fears by Tom Clancy



One in the series of Jack Ryan novels. This one delves into what might happen if terrorists were to get a hold of the materials needed to make a nuclear bomb.

http://www.amazon.ca/Sum-All-Fears-T...6319497&sr=8-2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sum_of_All_Fears

It is a thriller, and fairly engrossing. I like them; they aren't light fare but they aren't difficult to read, either.

[driveway]

In the anthology-short story category Team Discovery Channel is proud to select:



Aye, and Gomorrah and other stories by Samuel R. Delaney.

An unquestioned master of science-fiction, and one of the fewer than 20 living members of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Delaney is, in my opinion, the best pure writer who has ever worked in the genre.

Some may write better sci fi: Heinlen, Niven and Pournell, Vance, Asimov, but no one can touch Delaney's skill with language.

Aye and Gamorrah and other stories collects some of Delaney's best work including the titular work which won Delaney his third Nebula in 1967. Other brillant stories include Driftglass, my choice for all-time best titled short story Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones and the fantasy Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo.

In addition to phenomenal titles, Delaney writes some of the best first-lines you'll ever read:

"Only the dark and her screaming." - We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line
"Two glass panes with dirt between and little tunnels from cell to cell: when I was a kid I had an ant colony" - The Star Pit
"Bloody lace lazied on the bay" - omegahelm

The book is thematic in that all the stories are about emigrants, the problems of people who do not live in the city of their birth.

About this time every year I start putting together a package to apply for the Master's in Writing program at Temple University where Delaney teaches.

[rogermexico]

I'll use my Fiction - Wildcard pick to select Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner.



The mother of all flashback novels!

[habernac]

under American Literature, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.



I'm tired, here's wiki:

The novel is divided into five books. In the first book, Henry meets and attempts to seduce Catherine Barkley and their relationship begins. While on the Italian front, Henry is wounded in the knee by a mortar shell and sent to a hospital in Milan. The second book shows the growth of Henry and Catherine's relationship as they spend time together in Milan over the summer. Henry falls in love with Catherine and by the time he is healed, Catherine is three months pregnant. In the third book, Henry returns to his unit, but not long after, the Austro-Germans break through the Italian lines and the Italians retreat. Henry kills an engineering sergeant for insubordination. After falling behind and catching up again, Henry is taken to a place by the "battle police" where officers are being interrogated and executed for the "treachery" that supposedly led to the Italian defeat. However, after hearing the execution of a Lt.Colonel, Henry escapes by jumping into a river. In the fourth book, Catherine and Henry reunite and flee to Switzerland in a rowing boat. In the final book, Henry and Catherine live a quiet life in the mountains until she goes into labor. After a long and painful labor, their son is stillborn. Catherine begins to hemorrhage and soon dies, leaving Henry to return to their hotel in the rain.

[octothorp]

I love these last two picks, and Dubliners as well. It's sort of shocking that it took 12 rounds before any Faulkner was picked... I was very close to picking him (a different novel though) for my American novel. It seems to me that there are a lot of truly great American classics still available late in the draft.

Iowa Flames Fan, Liaminator, and Gary Powers are up next.

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Well, on that note (and I promise I was already picking this!) for the 12th selection in this draft, team Bartleby and the Scriveners will take in the Short Fiction/Anthology category, Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner.


Go Down, Moses is more or less a "story sequence," collecting Faulkner's "Yoknapatawpha County" stories in one volume, and of course although each can stand alone, they also can be seen as a fragmentary and disjointed "book" in its own right--not unlike a number of "Story sequences" from that time--Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio comes to mind. But Faulkner's take on regionalism is tinged with his signature apocalyptic sensibility and his curiously bloated yet carefully constructed prose. Each story revolves around some key action sequence--a fight between a bear and a dog, the killing of a doe, etc.--that stands in for the sinfulness of man in general, and the trace of shame that we carry with us across the generations. It's a fantastic read, and a great place to begin for a first-time Faulkner reader.

[liamenator]

In Pre-20th Century, I'll take a book that continuously makes my head hurt, and that contains some of the fundamental aspects of contemporary theory. Post-modernism and existentialism begin, in many respects, with Nietzsche.

This book is simultaneously exhilarating, and horifying.

Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil

[troutman]

I select in the History category, THE DISCOVERERS by DANIEL BOORSTIN (1983):

My favorite history books are about first contacts between different cultures. This book is full of stories like this (Book Two - The Earth And The Seas).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discoverers



The Discoverers, subtitled A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself, is the history of human discovery. Discovery in all its many forms are present - exploration, scientific, medical, mathematical and the more theoretical ones such as time, evolution, plate tectonics and relativity. He praises the inventive, human mind and its eternal quest to discover the universe and our place in it. In "A Personal Note to the Reader" Boorstin writes, "My hero is Man, the Discoverer. The world we now viewfrom the literate West...had to be opened by countless Columbuses. In the deep recesses of the past, they remain anonymous." The structure is topical and chronological, beginning in the prehistoric era in Babylon and Egypt. The work has been divided into four sections he calls "books".

http://www.amazon.com/Discoverers-Da.../dp/0394726251

Perhaps the greatest book by one of our greatest historians, The Discoverers is a volume of sweeping range and majestic interpretation. To call it a history of science is an understatement; this is the story of how humankind has come to know the world, however incompletely ("the eternal mystery of the world," Einstein once said, "is its comprehensibility"). Daniel J. Boorstin first describes the liberating concept of time--"the first grand discovery"--and continues through the age of exploration and the advent of the natural and social sciences. The approach is idiosyncratic, with Boorstin lingering over particular figures and accomplishments rather than rushing on to the next set of names and dates. It's also primarily Western, although Boorstin does ask (and answer) several interesting questions: Why didn't the Chinese "discover" Europe and America? Why didn't the Arabs circumnavigate the planet? His thesis about discovery ultimately turns on what he calls "illusions of knowledge." If we think we know something, then we face an obstacle to innovation. The great discoverers, Boorstin shows, dispel the illusions and reveal something new about the world.

Although The Discoverers easily stands on its own, it is technically the first entry in a trilogy that also includes The Creators and The Seekers. An outstanding book--one of the best works of history to be found anywhere. --John J. Miller

[troutman]

jammies ak'd

[Aeneas]

I will fill in the childrens literature category.

One of my daughter and my favorites.

"The Cat And The Wizard"



Written by Dennis Lee, Illustrated by Gillian Johnson.

Designed by PETER MAHER! Likely not that one.

"A senior wizard of high degree,
with a special diploma in wizardry.
Is trudging along,
at the top of the street,
With a scowl on his face,
and a pain in his feet..."

"A beard, a bundle,
A right angle stoop,
And a hand-me-down coat,
Embroidered with soup,
A halo of smoke,
and a sputtery sound-
The only real magic
Magician around."

So it begins. It is the story of this magician that nobody in todays world wants or needs. He meets a cat who lives alone in a castle. A very lonely cat who sets out a fancy dinner every night for so many guests; and no one ever comes.

The wizard:

"But nobody nowadays
Welcomes a wizard:
They'll take in a spaniel,
Make room for a lizard-
But show them a conjurer
Still on the ball,
And nowbody wants him
Or needs him at all."

The Cat:

"...And every night,
At half past ten,
She climbs up to bed
By herself, again.

For a cat is a cat
In a castle or no,
And people are people
Wherever you go."

They meet, and of course happiness ensues.
I like that it is a poem; makes it a pleasure to read. No matter how often I must read it, I do not mind. It is so much better than, "Ola, my name is Dora." Argh.

Hope it gives my daughter an appreciation for poetry.

[troutman]

Best SF/Fantasy of 2008:

Reader’s picks:

http://www.sfsite.com/columns/best09b.htm

Editor’s picks:

http://www.sfsite.com/columns/best09.htm

[Jagger]

I'll select my second Mass/Pulp Fiction pick.

The Lion's Game

by

Nelson De Mille







Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Lions-Game-Nel.../dp/0446608262

Amazon.com Review
John Corey and Asad Khalil have both lived hard-knock lives. As revealed in Nelson DeMille's monster bestseller Plum Island, the gruff, wisecracking NYPD homicide cop Corey stopped a hail of bullets--but he couldn't stop his wife from walking out on him. Asad, raised under Muammar Qaddafi's eye after his dad's murder, lost his surviving family in the 1986 bombing of Libya. He's heard the nasty rumors about his mom and the colonel, but he aims his rage at the infidels. The boy's got such a gift for terrorism he's earned the nickname "the Lion," and Boris, his vodka-sozzled, sex-addicted émigré mentor, knows precisely how to conduct a murder tour of America one step ahead of the police, the FBI, the CIA, and the ATTF (Anti-Terrorist Task Force), which combines members of all three. A pity Boris must die, but hey, he's an infidel too. Asad pretends to defect, handcuffed to agents aboard a 747 bound for JFK, and he proves to be a worse seatmate than a siding salesman. Corey and his ATTF colleagues (most conspicuously the FBI's sexy Kate Mayfield, Corey's match in badinage and bad-guy busting) strive to halt Asad's methodical yet unpredictable bloodbath. Skillfully, DeMille alternates chapters told from Asad's and Corey's points of view. DeMille did his authenticity homework: when we're not savoring his gift for wiseacre dialogue in the Corey-Kate chapters, we're sweating alongside Asad on his ghastly, ingenious jihad.
The New York Times put DeMille's social satire on a par with Edith Wharton's, and he's great on the colliding folkways of the feuding, mutually doublecrossing crimebuster institutions. Naturally, he's on the side of the regular-guy flatfoots. "Cops sit on their asses and flip through their folders," he writes. "Feds sit on their derrieres and peruse their dossiers." And the CIA gets it in the shorts, satirically speaking. One deplores the mass murderers, but the book's real bad guys wear the priciest suits.
DeMille reportedly has a $25 million book contract. With fast, funny, absorbing thrillers like The Lion's Game, he's earned it.

[troutman]

Burn ak'd

[habernac]

I will almost definitely be logging in occasionally, but after today, I am out of town for two weeks so you can AK me if/when my turn comes up.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by habernac

I will almost definitely be logging in occasionally, but after today, I am out of town for two weeks so you can AK me if/when my turn comes up.

PM me a pick or two if you have time.

[Circa89]

I am waiting for my turn and will have my pick ready, however I will be heading off on Holidays from the 20th to the 30th as well. I will PM you some picks Trout.

[RougeUnderoos]

Uh, whoops. I didn't realize it was my turn. Y'all can go ahead and I'll get this done when I figure out what I'm picking.

[octothorp]

Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos

Uh, whoops. I didn't realize it was my turn. Y'all can go ahead and I'll get this done when I figure out what I'm picking.

So that means I'm up? erm... I'm not going to have time to think about it until tomorrow. AK me, too.

[Circa89]

I need a Eurolit pick so I will go ahead and select.


All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues) Erich Maria Remarque.




According to Wiki: The novel was first published in November and December 1928 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung and in book form in late January 1929. It sold 2.5 million copies in twenty-five languages in its first eighteen months in print.

English Translation by Arthur Wesley Wheen in 1930


The book is about the horrors of war (WWI in particular) and the difficulty a young soldier has making the transition back to civilian life. It amazes me that anyone can participate in a war and live a normal life afterwords. Especially intriquing novel because it was written from the other side, the enemy's viewpoint. A Universal message authored the brutally graphic description of the battlefield. A message that is as relevant for the troops returning from Afganistan as is was for a young main in 1918 Germany.

[octothorp]

Well, I knew I was going to end up picking this book at some point, so it might as well be now: Glen Dresser's Correction Road (Oberon Press, 2007).

I'll put it in the Can-Lit category for now. Shortlisted for the City of Calgary book prize and longlisted for the national ReLit Award. A story set 1979 around the Alberta Rat Patrol, following the lives of three people living in a small town on the Alberta/Saskatchewan border: an officer on the rat patrol, his girlfriend - a liquor store employee, and the alcoholic curator of the small town museum. Through complex narrative devices, the book explores themes of alienation, separation, and studies the idea of place through layers of geological, social, or personal history. The rat patrol is used as a way of exploring political alienation (and the futility of such sentiments), a theme that's linked back to the level of personal relationships. And it has a reference to Willi Plett. If I was going to write a book, this would be the book that I'd write. And infact, I did write this book.