new book choices

I'll leave it to Lumpy to report on last week's meeting, as I had to coach a soccer match and thus arrived late (but early enough to take part in the speculation on why his girlfriend read A Sport and a Pastime). Here, however, are the book choices for next month: The Voyage, by Philip Caputo; The Nonexistent Knight, by Italo Calvino; Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer; and Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. The poll is open for a week . . . feel free to add your comments here and lobby for your preferred choice. We'll set a meeting date shortly for sometime in May.

what's on deck for the Neanderthals?

Let me first say that I'm sorry for the delay in posting after our last meeting--I've been inundated with the day-to-day of getting a new Varsity soccer season up and running. At any rate, we had a good meeting at the end of last month--Lumpkin, Enloe, Parker and me gathering to discuss All the King's Men. Unexpectedly, and rather inexplicably, Fox and Hounds was closed for cleaning and renovations ("who ever heard of a bar's closing for cleaning" mused Chip), so we all sauntered next door to The Big Easy, which was, in retrospect, a far more appropriate locale for discussing this particular novel.

I'll leave it for others to comment further about the book, except to offer this: while I luxuriated in the poetry of Robert Penn Warren's descriptions (a consensus opinion among us), I had trouble at times reconciling this voice as coming from a 1st person narrator--if I take a step back and think about it a little, I just can't see Jack Burden speaking or writing this way.

Anyway, what's next for us? In keeping with the roughly bimonthly schedule we've adopted since reconstituting, looks like we should plan our next meeting for late March or thereabouts--we'll work out a date soon to suit the schedules of our regulars. The book choices we agreed upon putting up to a vote are as follows: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac; A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess; A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter; Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays, by Albert Camus; and White Noise, by Don DeLillo. I should mention that all of these works are nice and short . . . probably a welcome change after Crime and Punishment and All The King's Men. Weigh in by the end of this week!

suggestions for upcoming books?

With our (rescheduled) January meeting a few days away, perhaps we should start throwing out suggestions for future reads; what would you like the Neanderthals to tackle next month (and beyond)?

I'll fire the first shot . . . I'd be interested in reading On The Road or A Clockwork Orange.

Any strong requests or recommendations?

Lumpy on "Why you should read All The King's Men"

I finally made time to put down a few thoughts regarding All The King's Men. If you have read about it, you know that it is about Governor Willie Stark. However, it is really about Stark's Assistant, Jack Burden, and how Burden gets along in Stark's world.

Penn Warren's gift is, like Nabakov, the sound and feel of language. His other gift, and just as extraordinary, is his ability to describe the indescribable...finding words for feelings, places, and people that we all struggle to communicate about. See if you can find better descriptions for rural farmland, childhood innocence/growing up, adult struggles with priorities, and more. These physical descriptions make the characters vivid to the point that you think Warren must have really known these people. In turn, we realize we know someone with each and every trait.

These achievements are why the book appears on every "TOP 100 Novels" list Here's a brief synopsis of the scenes or parts of the book:

1. OPENING: Incredible language describing Governor Stark returning to his North Louisiana town and home on a press tour to get photos for promotion.
2. FLASHBACK TO EARLY WILLIE: How Jack Burden met The Boss and how the Boss became a dynamic politician, and rose through the system to become Governor. Great scenes in here about a return to Burden's hometown to see The Judge. You get little bits and pieces of Jack's childhood with Adam and Anne Stanton (and a Perfect Summer), but not the full, engaging story that comes later. Those childhood/falling in love scenes are some of the best reading I've ever done.
3. CASS MASTERN: Burden's research project for his History PhD.
   Burden's research into his Judge Irwin, his family friend (and later we find out...way more), where Burden finds Irwin's checkered past for the Boss to leverage.
4. Burden's trip West to ponder bad news. This section has the Perfect Summer flashback mentioned earlier. Brilliant writing.
   Burden's return to Louisiana, the trip home to burn the Judge that goes wrong.
5. The end. The conclusion.

Happy Reading!!

Michael