You take that back!
That was really my favorite part. Who hasn’t wanted to leap out of their car to beat up a gang of mimes?
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I’m in! I’m gonna download The Quarry right away, even if we decide otherwise.
Once we’ve nailed down the nominee, I guess our next decision will be procedural: are we gonna read the book all at once and discuss it afterwards? Or will we have, like, periodic chapter deadlines (or similar, like “the first 50 pages by Wednesday”) so we can discuss the work in progress?
I’ve never done a book-club thingie, so I am largely ignorant of such details. I am a fairly fast reader (not as much as I used to be, though; I read all 1,138 pages of Stephen King’s IT in two poolside afternoons when I was in high school), but I figure we’ll all want to be more-or-less literally on the same page when we talk about it, and everyone’s commitment load and reading speed will be different.
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I think assigning a certain number of chapters to be read by such-and-such a date, at which point we start discussing that section, is a reasonable option.
If someone doesn’t get to the reading in time, they can choose to NOT click on the thread until they’ve caught up, or be involved in the discussion while feverishly catching up at the same time.
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I will be checking the library for it shortly : )
thanks for admin-ing the voting, Raita.
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How long will we have to read?
Books are horribly expensive here in NZ, so I generally buy from Book Depository or Amazon. I’ve ordered online, but it won’t reach here for a couple of weeks …
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At least you’ll have company for that. Fuck Australian book pricing. 
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Immediately available as an ebook from the library 
Now I have two Banks books to read in the next 3 weeks, because I’m only a third of the way through The Hydrogen Sonata…
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Do you have a way to read it on a screen? You can download various apps for free (Kindle, Nook, iBooks, etc.) to take advantage of eBooks even if you don’t have a dedicated piece of reading equipment.
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I could, but deliberately avoid ebooks because of DRM. Plus I’m working on lining a room with real books. 
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I just “ordered” the Quarry from my local library - there was one available but it was located in other city (which is part of the same library system, so the books can be moved around), so I’ll get it in 1-2 days time.
I got the English version automatically without actually even checking if there IS a Finnish version yet; I just always prefer to read things in their original language, and it works better for the sake of this discussion group, too.
I’d love to actually own it, but don’t have the money for that. Maybe after reading, if I absolutely love it, I’ll buy it, but library works for me better.
Sounds reasonable to me. But first we have to make sure everybody gets the book in their hands. I don’t know how long that will take for some people?
Not for me.
3 weeks?! Hell, with any luck I might be able to get a paper copy within that time, never mind having read and discussed it. Y’all way too quick for me. Looks like I’ll have to bite the bullet and pay rip-off prices.
Hey, no rush. Let’s take our time so everybody can catch up.
But do you people think we should make a new topic now that we’ve chosen the first book to read? This one has grown into a monster. We can discuss how long we’ll wait till we start reading, how many chapters we’ll read at a time etc.
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I thought the idea was we weren’t going to rush, just going to take a couple of months or so to let everyone read the book, then start a new thread to discuss it.
I guess we could talk about the first few chapters earlier - but the only experience I’ve ever had of discussing something piecemeal was Thelma & Louise in my Media Studies GCSE, and it totally ruined the film for me. Haven’t revisited it to watch it properly, and that was 20 years ago. Maybe it didn’t totally suck, I don’t know.
Well that’s the thing, I don’t think we’ve decided on how we’re doing this to begin with. I thought we’d read the whole book in one go and then discuss, as well, but a few people have spoken in favor of doing the discussion gradually (which sounds good to me, too). That’s why I wanted to make a new thread - there we can talk about how we’re doing this all. Maybe we’ll vote on it if people so wish.
But, new thread? Please?
Oh, I don’t know…that could be quite interesting. What do you think of the book, Raita? Well, I thought: Kirja on hyvin kirjoitettu, mutta en pidä aihe.
We’d learn even more in this book group than we bargained for!
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It did NOT, in fact, totally suck!
Well, it turns out the translation isn’t out yet anyway, so we can scratch that. Maybe we can try it with some other book, one that preferably wasn’t originally in English anyway so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on the original text.
Also, your Finnish sentence was almost good enough for me to believe you didn’t just GoogleTranslate it, but the last word should’ve been conjugated but wasn’t. It’s surprisingly good, though; usually GoogleTranslate doesn’t like Finnish at all and just craps all over the language.
I’m still pissed off that we were going to do Alien, then they changed their mind. We got to watch the credit sequence and that was it. Probably because it was an 18 certificate film and we were all 16. Thelma and Louise was a 15. Teacher must have had a Ridley Scott thing.
I was off sick the last week so I’ve never seen the ending, either.
I even tried a couple of options, like “subject” vs. “subject matter” to see if it would change the construction of the sentence!
But hey, you understood it, and that’s really as good as we can hope for right now from an online translator.
Some day, we’ll have the Universal Translator that makes all science fiction stories possible. Although I’d love to see a sci-fi movie use closed captioning instead, to really bring home the notion that all aliens do NOT speak English, thankyouverymuch!
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=8-O
You are pulling my leg, right? Seriously?
OK, I’ll bring the popcorn. You must watch T&L from start to finish. It’s not the finest film ever made (heck, I just re-watched “On the Waterfront” this weekend, which couldn’t be more different) but it’s iconic for a number of reasons.
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