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[Vector]

Given the throngs of fine literary folk who frequent this forum, I thought it might be fun to start a book club.

How we're going to do this still needs to be worked out, but I figured we should get a list of books people might want to read and discuss as a group, and then decide from there how long we want to give it before we start talking.

Alternatively, we could just talk about whatever we're reading in general, without necessarily using the "group" format.

[Realmfighter]

The Culture books by Iain M. Banks.

[MaximumZero]

Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa (I know it's mostly fiction, but it's still a good story.)

[ToonyMan]

I'm reading Cuckoo's Nest.

[Aklyon]

woo, book club!

[Retro]

I still haven't had time to finish Timequake yet, but I'm hoping to get into The Book of Negroes after that. I wasn't interested in reading the latter for a while, but I met Lawrence Hill and after talking to him I'm really excited about it.

[Rilder]

I've been reading "Das Boot" off and on, won the book in a contest on a forum I frequent, its pretty good.

[Criptfeind]

Macbeth

Not bad.

[Vector]

We aren't very talkative about our reading material, are we...

[Realmfighter]

Too busy reading.

[MaximumZero]

Never been in a book club...don't really know what people would like to know, or what I'm even supposed to be doing in here.

[Vector]

Never been in a book club...don't really know what people would like to know, or what I'm even supposed to be doing in here.

Ahhh, the things my popularity does...

Anyway, you just kind of... talk about books.  "This is what I'm reading, and this is what it's about, and this is what I like, and this is what I don't like, and my god this thing is full of social criticism or not."  It's kind of like a combo happy/sad thread, but for books.  Maybe you post favorite quotations.  And so on, and so forth.

[Criptfeind]

We aren't very talkative about our reading material, are we...

I am at the part where he goes crazy and kills the king.

[Mindmaker]

I'm interested.

I've got a book called "Watching the English" by Kate Fox, I've started reading but didn't finish, so I might as well start over again.

In WATCHING THE ENGLISH anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and byzantine codes of behaviour. Her minute observation of the way we talk, dress, eat, drink, work, play, shop, drive, flirt, fight, queue - and moan about it all - exposes the hidden rules that we all unconsciously obey.

The rules of weather-speak. The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The paranoid-pantomime rule. Class indicators and class anxiety tests. The money-talk taboo. Humour rules. Pub etiquette. Table manners. The rules of bogside reading. The dangers of excessive moderation. The eccentric-sheep rule. The English 'social dis-ease'.

Through a mixture of anthropological analysis and her own unorthodox experiments (using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig), Kate Fox discovers what these unwritten behaviour codes tell us about Englishness.

It's well written and quite humorous.
And everybody can benefit from being a little more british

[ToonyMan]

I wonder how Cuckoo's Nest is going to end, I'm about to read part 4.

I wonder is Chief will make his secret that he isn't mute public.