The Book Club discussion

Sometimes we will find lists or articles about books that it may be useful to archive for ourselves, even if many or most are unlikely to match our proclivities. This is the thread for those.

What to put on your summer reading list [2013]
By Larry Swedroe
July 5, 2013, 1:34 PM

(MoneyWatch) Each year, I publish a list of books I've read in the course of the year, along with my personal ratings. With the Fourth of July holiday and summer having arrived, I thought you might be looking for a good read. So here's a brief list of the best http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1... I've read so far this year:

"The Company" by Robert Littell -- in short, the best spy novel I've ever read

"The Success Equation" by Michael J. Mauboussin -- a fascinating look at the problem of differentiating skill from luck

"The Physics of Wall Street" by James Owen Weatherall -- how physicists have changed Wall Street, for better and worse
"Moloka'i" by Alan Brennert -- beautiful story of lepers and the colony on Moloka'i

"Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" by Barbara Demick -- amazing tale about life (if you can call it that) in North Korea

There were other good reads from some of my favorite authors. In most cases I've read everything they've written. So if you liked their prior books, you'll like these as well. And if you haven't discovered them yet, you should.

"Live by Night" by Dennis Lehane -- Lehane is a great storyteller
"The Panther" by Nelson DeMille -- DeMille is the best writer of dialogue around
"The Black Box" by Michael Connelly -- characters don't get any better than detective Harry Bosch

If you're a fan of Mary Higgins Clark (who writes perfect beach books), "I'll Walk Alone" won't disappoint. The same can be said about Sue Grafton's "V is for Vengeance" and Robert Crais' "Suspect." (To be honest, "Suspect" isn't Crais' best book. It's not about Joe Pike and Elvis Cole, and those books are great.)

And finally, I can also recommend "Killing Kennedy" and "Killing Lincoln," both by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. (Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy Boxed Set) They're both fast reads, well researched and better than I expected.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_16...

(Will return to edit more.)

Summer Books
TIME Presents the 12 All-Time Great Summer Reads

Factoring in raw data, cultural impact, and a bit of sentimentality, we've come up with a list of our favorite seasonal tomes. Which books did you love—and which have we left off?

By Alexander Aciman@acimania June 21, 2013

To celebrate the beginning of a new season, TIME editors have compiled a list of our favorite summer reads from the past 40 years. What defines a summer read? To us, it’s the kind of buzzed-about book that seems to flourish in warmer months, equally ubiquitous on beaches and in subway cars. (Not all summer reads are mindless page-turners—one of our selected titles is a brainy mystery that touches on medieval studies and semiotics.) Once you’ve perused the list, take our poll and help us crown the All-Time, Ultimate Summer Read.

And we acknowledge that our list is by no means definitive—though we think it’s a darn good representation of 40 years of seasonal tomes. So we invite you to help fill in our gaps—to correct what you might think are our egregious oversights—by telling us which books should join our list. Tweet your picks—or share what you plan on reading this summer—using the hashtag #SummerBooks. We’ll post the winner of this poll alongside a collection of your suggestions next Friday, June 27.

And now, on to our list…
Love Story, Erich Segal (1970) After leaving Harvard with a PhD in Comparative Literature, Segal published this fictional account of a Harvard-Radcliffe romance. The same year, the book was made into what would be one of the biggest films of the decade, starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw. Both the novel and the film became cult classics, known for their sappy tagline “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Love Story was published in February 1970, and reached #1 on the New York Times’ Best Sellers list in May. Success meant Segal never had to say he was sorry.

The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty (1971) Blatty’s fifth novel told the story of a Washington D.C. girl whose mother seeks out a local priest to treat her demon-like behavior. Based on an urban legend Blatty heard more than 20 years earlier in college, the novel was part of a wave of cultural preoccupation with demonic possession (think: Rosemary’s Baby). Blatty also wrote the screenplay for the film version, which came out two years later and featured a demon girl projectile-vomiting pea soup onto a priest’s face, and scared-to-death baby boomers leaving the theater. The novel stayed at #1 for most of the summer of ’71, and the adapted screenplay earned Blatty an Oscar.

Jaws, Peter Benchley (1974) The film adaptation’s most famous line—“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”—appeared nowhere in the original novel. But the book was a massive success, and paperback versions could be seen on display in every bookstore in the summer of ‘74. The story of a small beach-town ambushed by a shark with a taste for human flesh stayed on the bestsellers list for almost a year, and offered avid readers a good excuse to stay out of the water during trips to the beach.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré (1974) Le Carré’s seventh novel stars his most famous recurring character, George Smiley (later played by Alec Guinness in the 1979 BBC television series), an intelligence officer called back into duty in order to track down the Soviet spy who infiltrated England’s Secret Intelligence Service. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, was one of le Carré’s favorite of his own books (along with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold); published in June, it provided a handy Cold War distraction for all the readers too scared by Jaws to go near the ocean.

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco (1983*) In his first novel, semiotician–turned–thriller-writer Umberto Eco laid a Sherlock Holmes trope over a story about murders in a Benedictine monastery: in a nod to Conan Doyle the friar sent to investigate (Sean Connery, in the film, accompanied by his Watson-like sidekick Christian Slater) is named William of Baskerville and concludes at one point that a deduction was “elementary.” It turns out that the murders actually tie in to a plot attempting to hide a lost chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics—which, to be fair, any learned person would in fact probably murder to get their hands on. Somehow, this all braininess translated into a hot beach read. (*The book was originally published in Italian in 1980, and translated into English in 1983)

(MORE: Season’s Readings: Best Summer Books 2012)
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis (1991) Ellis’s central character, Patrick Bateman, sells junk bonds, lives in a Central Park West penthouse and eats at the city’s finest restaurants; but when he leaves the office he indulges an insatiable compulsion to kill. In addition to being a serial killer, Bateman is also a proto-metrosexual: he obsesses over mineral water, and spends a page and a half describing his morning skincare routine, down to which eye cream he prefers. Although it never made any bestsellers list, the publicity surrounding the book’s original publisher dropping the title made American Psycho the macabre fascination of the year.

The Pelican Brief, John Grisham (1992) Grisham’s third novel (and one of his most famous), The Pelican Brief begins with the murder of two Supreme Court Justices and follows the detailed amateur investigation of a law student and a reporter. The novel marks an interesting shift in mystery thrillers: no longer were the main characters Smith & Wesson-toting private eyes, but rather, journalists chasing a story bigger than they can swallow.

The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield (1993) Perhaps the most interesting thing about Redfield’s runaway best-seller is that it was actually a successful self-published book, back when self-publishing required a lot of start-up money and dead trees. The author sold almost 100,000 copies—many from the trunk of his car—before it was picked up by Warner Books. The story focuses on spiritual phenomena and an ancient Peruvian text that illustrates key enlightening and spiritual moments humans should undergo. The narrator travels to Peru to experience these nine spiritual insights. Because the book sold so well, the author decided to write another one about a tenth insight, but that one attained neither beach-read nor cult status.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000) The fourth book in the blockbuster series about the boy wizard was the first volume released simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States. It was also the first time a Harry Potter release was met with fans in Harry and Hermione costumes waiting in line at midnight—that is, until the first Harry Potter movie came out a year later.

The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003) Academics were surprised when they learned, a few pages in, that The Da Vinci Code was novel about the secret life of Jesus, instead of a text about Da Vinci. But then, Dan Brown wasn’t writing for academics. His breathless tale, which earned criticism for misrepresenting various schools of thought on art and religion, sold more than 50 million copies and was made into hit movie in which Tom Hanks regularly mispronounces “Knights Templar.” The Da Vinci Code was on the New York Times best sellers list for more than 150 weeks—about three years.

The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson (2009) In France, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series—with its unlikely crime-solving duo of a financial journalist and a misanthropic hacker—was the trendiest trilogy to carry around in the Metro. When the posthumous series finally hit the US, the books sold so well that they went to paperback while the hardcovers were still on shelves in some bookstores. The Girl Who Played With Fire—the second installment in the series—became the book to read during the summer of 2009, and made it to #1 on the Times list in August.

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (2012) A journalist moves his wife from New York to the small town he grew up in and becomes the lead suspect when she mysteriously disappears. At first one might assume that, like The Shining, Gone Girl is a polemic against marrying writers and removing them from big cities. Later, however, it becomes clear that Flynn’s breakout novel is less a thriller about a disappearance than a study of a marriage fraught with problems and deceit that has manifested itself by way of a thriller. Either way, if you weren’t reading it last summer, you missed the definitive book of the season.

What's the quintessential summer read?

1970: 'Love Story,' by Erich Segal
1971: 'The Exorcist,' by William Peter Blatty
1974: 'Jaws,' by Peter Benchley
1974: 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,' by John le Carré
1980: 'The Name of the Rose,' by Umberto Eco
1991: 'American Psycho,' by Bret Easton Ellis
1992: 'The Pelican Brief,' by John Grisham
1993: 'The Celestine Prophecy,' by James Redfield
2000: 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,' by J.K. Rowling
2003: 'The Da Vinci Code,' by Dan Brown
2009: 'The Girl Who Played With Fire,' by Stieg Larsson
2012: 'Gone Girl,' by Gillian Flynn

Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2013/06...

(Needs editing.)

Here is a list of 50 living "best" British authors published in The Times in 2008 and a blogger's update/view thereof:

http://www.publicpoems.com/2008/01/ti...

Another view with links to Goodreads entries on these authors, and hence to book reviews for each:

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2...

Excerpts about leading authors from the Wiki entry for Harold Bloom:

Bloom's association with the Western canon has provoked a substantial interest in his opinion concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers. In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: "Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett. He's certainly the most authentic."[26]

After Beckett's death in 1989, Bloom has pointed towards other authors as the new main figures of the Western literary canon.

Concerning British writers: "Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active", and "no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Iris Murdoch's eminence". Since Murdoch's death, Bloom has expressed admiration for novelists such as Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, John Banville, and A. S. Byatt.[27]

In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, he named the late Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize winner José Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today", and as "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre".

Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 that "there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise".[28] He claimed that "they write the Style of our Age, each has composed canonical works," and he identified them as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo. He named their strongest works as, respectively, Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon; American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater; Blood Meridian; and Underworld. He has added to this estimate the work of John Crowley, with special interest in his Aegypt Sequence and novel Little, Big saying that "only a handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets...only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level".[29]

In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Bloom identified Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s, he regularly named A.R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he has lately come to identify Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He has expressed great admiration for the Canadian poet Anne Carson, particularly her verse novel Autobiography of Red. Bloom also lists Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets.

Bloom's introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon (1987) features his canon of the "twentieth-century American Sublime", the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Playwright Tony Kushner sees Bloom as an important influence on his work.

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

The Popsugar Reading Challenges lay out a set of prompts for choosing a book. This is their list for 2018. I will be laying in candidates as the year goes by. Feel free to add messages with your own suggestions.

2018 Popsugar Reading Challenge

1. A book made into a movie you've already seen
2. True Crime
3. The next book in a series you started
4. A book involving a heist
5. Nordic noir
6. A novel based on a real person
7. A book set in a country that fascinates you
8. A book with a time of day in the title
9. A book about a villain or antihero
10. A book about death or grief
11. A book with a female author who uses a male pseudonym. (George Eliot)
12. A book with an LGBTQ+ protagonist
13. A book that is also a stage play or musical
14. A book by an author of a different ethnicity than you
15. A book about feminism (Virginia Woolf)
16. A book about mental health
17. A book you borrowed or that was given to you as a gift
18. A book by two authors
19. A book about or involving a sport
20. A book by a local author
21. A book with your favorite color in the title
22. A book with alliteration in the title
23. A book about time travel ( The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger)
24. A book with a weather element in the title
25. A book set at sea. ( The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat)
26. A book with an animal in the title
27. A book set on a different planet
28. A book with song lyrics in the title
29. A book about or set on Halloween
30. A book with characters who are twins
31. A book mentioned in another book
32. A book from a celebrity book club
33. A childhood classic you've never read
34. A book that's published in 2018 ( A Matter of Chance: A Novel by Julie Maloney)
35. A past Goodreads Choice Awards winner
36. A book set in the decade you were born
37. A book you meant to read in 2017 but didn't get to
38. A book with an ugly cover
39. A book that involves a bookstore or library
40. Your favorite prompt from the 2015, 2016, or 2017 POPSUGAR Reading Challenges

2018 Popsugar Advanced Reading Challenge

1. A bestseller from the year you graduated high school (1961 Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger)
2. A cyberpunk book
3. A book that was being read by a stranger in a public place
4. A book tied to your ancestry
5. A book with a fruit or vegetable in the title. (Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples, a reread; or The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, or The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov)
6. An allegory
7. A book by an author with the same first or last name as you
8. A microhistory
9. A book about a problem facing society today. (Jonathan Haidt)
10. A book recommended by someone else taking the POPSUGAR Reading Challenge

Monthly List for Group Reads

January-Nordic Noir
February- A Book About or Involving Sport (Winter Olympics)
March-A Book About Feminism (Women's History Month)
April-A Book that Involves a Bookstore or Library (National Library Month)
May-A Book About Mental Health (Mental Health Awareness Month)
June-A Book with an LGBTQ+ Protagonist (2018 Pride Month)
July-A Book Set at Sea
August-A Book with Characters who are Twins (National Twins Day is August 3rd)
September-A Book that is also a Stage Play or Musical
October-A Book About or Set on Halloween
November-A Book About Death or Grief
December-A Book that's Published in 2018