looks like the first one folks are rallying around. I’m intrigued at this point. it seems interesting and there’s no way I’d ever read it without y’all to discuss it, which is the point of having the club I reckon.
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Just noticed this here thread. Are self-nominations cool? I can offer a Boinger’s Discount if there’s interest.
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The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is one that I own but have not yet read, so that’s another suggestion of mine.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks would be a great read,
Also The Trial or The Metamorphis by Frank Kafka, though it may not be possible to fully appreciate them without reading them in German.
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is something I’ve really been wanting to read. Or Choke would be fine too.
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee sounds interesting too.
And again, Bret Easton Ellis’ books are all worth reading. I love him.
I think we should make a list of the most liked recommendations, and vote.
Just don’t bother with Beautiful You (or anything else he’s written since, well, Haunted). Like Coupland, ever diminishing returns…and yet, there I am, reading everything they write.
Well, I dunno. I’m here to see what y’all think about whatever we decide to read, not necessarily to read something I otherwise wouldn’t. If you guys all voted to read The Ruins or The DaVinci Code or The Wolf Gift, I’d respectfully bow out 'cause life’s too goddamned short… but then, if you guys were Those Kinds Of Readers, I wouldn’t deign to be here with you in the first place. 
I’m looking forward to learning a lot from you guys. My fear with a book like Orientalism is that I’d essentially be approaching it from a position of near-total ignorance. I’ve never set foot east of Paris or west of Kauai (and then only on too-brief vacations), and my scholarship of the eastern world is functionally nil. Pretty much everything I will think or have to say about the topic will be directly from the book itself, or half-remembered tidbits from old news reports or Daily Show bits. I can foresee a vivid and vigorous discussion arising from such a book, informed and cross-referenced with a great many literary and scholarly sources with which I will be utterly unfamiliar. I won’t really mind being the tag-along kid in the grown-ups’ salon, since I can clam up and listen to what you educated and informed folks have to say (and I do like and respect you guys a heap), but I won’t be able to be particularly participatory, I fear.
Or maybe not. I haven’t laid eyes on the book yet, maybe I’ll find it weirdly right up my alley. Well, we’ll see how the vote goes, once it gets going.
dog, the furthest East I’ve ever been is NYC. I’ll be totally ignorant going into this (assuming Orientalism is the pick) but anything I don’t get, I’ll ask :^)
but, yeah, if the pick is something I’m particularly opposed to, I’ll respectfully bow out; I mentioned in the last thread I have a strict “no Murakami” policy after reading the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, for instance.
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I just read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, so I won’t be suggesting it 
(although I did quite like it - like I like all of Murakami’s stuff)
I just got @doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to be Free from the library, so that’s the next thing to be read, but I’ll read this here Orientalism thing if it’s the choice of the crowd, although I’m really more of a fiction guy most of the time (the aforementioned Information… book nothwithstanding).
he’s good and all. the flashback bit about Japan and Russia in WW2 was informative, so I liked that, but the overall prose and style just wasn’t for me.
Is excellent, but I also need an excuse to read his ‘An Anthropologist on Mars’. The titular essay is about Temple Grandin, professor, animal behaviourist and autistic.
Yeah, that’s a generally a “me too” here. It’s been a while since I spent much time reading nonfiction, I just realized. I was pretty happily reading Heinlein’s biography, in the nonfiction realm. The first volume (which I heard about here on the Boing) went down easily enough, even with all the footnotes and considerable length, but then I bogged down in volume two shortly after the Heinleins finally got disillusioned with the John Birch Society. It got tougher to like the guy during the Cold War, and I got impatient to get past his Communist-hating years in the Sixties.
Someday I want to read The Autobiography of Mark Twain (not for this particular group, as both volumes run to a total of 1,506 pages!), but I made the mistake of getting Volume One in hardcover instead of as an ebook. Man, what a doorstop. Too heavy to read in bed, and too little time to read it elsewhere.
Orientalism isn’t as good as the hype. There were issues even when it was written, many decades ago, and at this point many of the arguments in it are too dated to be useful, and/or have been surpassed by more current works. My $0.02, obviously.
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I’ve actually read way too much non-fiction lately, so I would love to read some good fiction in this group. Though I have myself suggested several non-fiction books too, so I don’t know.
Orientalism is… I’ll read it, of course, if that’s what people want. But I would rather read something more modern.
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I vote for fiction too.
Ows about this then?
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I totally agree, but I’d argue it’s still worth reading, even with it’s obvious short-comings. Going back to earlier scholarship can still be useful, even if it’s only to point out its problems.
That being said, I’m an academic, and that’s how we roll! 
[edited to add] and we could always pick a work that employs some of his theoretical models, but in a more dynamic and interesting fashion. We could also try something like Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which fits in with the same time period and mood that Said was writting his book in, but is probably still more useful today than Said’s.
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Welp, it seems like we have lots of good options. I’ll take a look at the list as it stands in the next day or two and ask people who suggested them to post them in a new thread I’ll create this weekend. From there, we can vote, I’d guess using likes and the work that gets the most likes wins?
Would you guys like me to set up two lists - one for fiction and one for non-fiction? We could always go back and forth between the two lists over the long haul.
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Are multiple likes OK?
If not, it might be easier to list them, then use replies with the format:
" Vote: $foo ". Easy to tally and to spot multiple votes.
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I don’t know… I guess that can still work. What do you think would work best?
I could see both working well enough. And it’s not like there’s going to be an overwhelming amount of votes one way or another. I think as long as the voting guidelines are clear, it probably doesn’t matter all that much.
And if we’re getting close to last call for nominations, I’d like to drop in the first volume of Mick Foley’s autobiography “Have a Nice Day”.
Partially because the boxing thread has spawned some polarised views, partially because I feel the need for something lowbrow to offset the scary academic tomes. 
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I think we should limit the votes (or likes) to something like 3 per person. That way, even if your favorite suggestion doesn’t get picked, you can vote for something you still find interesting, I at least have several “favorites” right now, so it would be nice if you could do that.
I wish you could like several times. Then we could vote three times; one worth 3 “points”, one 2 points and one 1 point. I think that kind of voting system works really well in cases like these, but it would be hard to actually achieve.
Also, could there maybe be different categories for fiction and non-fiction? I don’t know if that would be too much for people, but if we’re doing this quarterly, two books might not be impossible? Well, anyway, that’s just a suggestion.
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