I’ve read a bit of it, a chapter or two, looked quite interesting.
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I have a suggestion: BBSers like us being the unherdable cats we are, it might be useful to apply a bit of focus on your proposal in advance. Our suggestions are all over the place, from the pulpy to the literary to the scholarly to the polemical. All that is great, but the population is still small enough that it’s difficult to imagine that any winner will have received more than two or three votes. I’ll be frank; I’m in it for the fun. I love you guys and the way you think and the way you make me think, and though I do believe that a whole lot of the crap I read is lightweight and fun (at best) and doesn’t really lend itself to discussion and dissection, at the same time I wouldn’t necessarily want to dig into something too terribly heavy, or that felt like… y’know, work. Or eating my vegetables.
Now, don’t take away the wrong message; it’s not that I shy away from uncomfortable topics or modes of thought all the time. In fact, I’m totally game for The King Kong Theory if for no other reason than that it’s topical and bound to bring up some good discussion (and those of us who have posted in this thread aren’t likely to be ones who can’t discuss this stuff without devolving into flamewar). Plus, it’s a tight 160 pages. Hell, I read nearly that much just last night in this book (which, I admit, wasn’t what anyone past middle school would call challenging).
So since this is your idea and essentially your book group, Mindy, I think you should be the one to tighten the focus of the proposal a bit. Rather than just pick one of the 345,591 items available in the Pasadena Central Library’s collection, could we narrow it down in advance to a few shelves? Or at least a wing? General fiction? Nonfiction? Scholarly text? Twentieth-century literature? Genre fiction? National Book Award winners? (In that last case, may I suggest Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, if only because I am currently in possession of a couple dozen copies I could send to everyone, since Trumbo was my wife’s grandfather.)
Or do you prefer to keep this thing wide, wide open? Either way, it’s your call.
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Either Tijuana bibles or Constructivist poetry anthologies.
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Guess which one of those I own more of?
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I was going to suggest Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book but I just realized that it hasn’t released yet. 
Perhaps Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delaney? I’ve started on it before but haven’t finished it because it’s kind of daunting.
For a shorter book (which I also haven’t finished but for different reasons … it’s heartbreaking), Brian Francis Slattery’s Spaceman Blues: A Love Song is like jazz.
More in the mood for fiction than non-fiction personally. My interests in non-fiction are a bit too specific to have much hope of sharing them. 
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speaking of people that look like David Foster Wallace, I think of him every time I see Christian Kane from Leverage and The Librarians…maybe it is just me, but to my messed up brain they look like brothers.
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Oh, oh, oh, oh!
/Horshack
Why don’t we read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged and have a blast discussing exactly how awful they are as literary works?
OK, so maybe not.
I actually found “The Fountainhead” to be one of the most useful books in my collection. It was exactly the right page-count to support an old CRT monitor and the right size to press leaves inside it.
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One of my favorites. Lots of small tasty morsels of accidents and their causes.
Another one, also disasters and sometimes recoveries, on satellites and rockets.
My local library has a shelf of rolling recommended reads. The 9th graders from the local high school got to pick stuff last week -Atlas Shrugged was one of their choices.
Never read any Rand, but I have seen the movie of The Fountainhead with Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper. Must confess I loved it, mostly because the director (King Vidor) chose to emphasize (rather than attempt to normalize) the sheer madness of the script Rand wrote.
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Not heard of the movie, (mind you, not read the book either!) but I’ll give it a watch. Cheers!
Also didn’t [quote=“ChuckV, post:52, topic:49461”]
director (King Vidor)
[/quote] play bass in a Norwegian Black Metal band?
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Not that I’m aware of, but he did write “THAT WHICH HATH BEEN IS NOW” for the Christian Science Journal. That sounds kinda metal.
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If I remember which one The Fountainhead is, it’s the one I read and is actually tolerable if you don’t know who Ayn Rand is. Or if you treat it as the inevitable conclusion of the events of a trilogy which starts with Atlas Shrugged and ends up with people having to rebuild the world in The Fountainhead because John Galt and Ayn Rand are gigantic jerks (there is a well-fleshed-out joke on the internet somewhere that implies this exact thing; it’s quite awesome).
That said, I personally won’t be voting for The Fountainhead.
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Because I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it yet:
The Quarry -Iain Banks.
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That sounds good. For one, I like Ian Banks’’ books, and this one apparently deals with autism so I’m all for it. If you want another book about autism, I’m still recomennding The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. And of course The King Kong Theory,
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Well, I’ve read The Lives of Girls and Women so far, and found it rather flat and dull…
But Baldwin essays? Yes!
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I read “Orientalism” back in grad school and was so pathetically pissed off about it at the time - it was for a graduate class on “Modern British Drama” and I was embarrassingly clueless about why on earth this should involve reading Said, plays by authors in British colonies, etc. Oh, I cringe at my white privilege and puffed up outrage. (To be fair, I think the prof did a terrible job of articulating the pedagogy behind assigning it, but still.)
So it would be good to re-read it several decades after my first encounter, though I gave my copy to a white friend studying Traditional Chinese Medicine some years ago (thought it might be… relevant.)
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I’ll put a third voice in for Orientalism even though it is non-fiction. I’ve heard a little bit about it and it sounds like something I’d be interested in.
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