Tomato Nation Read-Along #2: Poll
Polling for Book #2 will end at 11:59 PM ET on July 6. Vote below!
Thanks again to everyone who participated in the live chat (you can watch a “replay” of it right here — upcoming readings! Mike takes his shirt off! I go missing and can’t find my tooth!), and especially to Pamie for getting carpal tunnel with us. I’ll schedule a live chat for our next book too; if it’s not a Q&A, I can get to everyone’s comments, which I wish I could have this time around — such insightful questions from all and sundry. Good times!
Don’t forget that you can continue to discuss the book in the more traditional comment-entry format right here for as long as you’d like.
And now it’s time to pick our next book! You’ll see a couple of favorites from the previous poll, plus a whole new set of tomes from my shelf. I don’t know if it will influence your choices at all, but if we end up reading the Wilker, I can probably produce him for an author event of some sort.
Aaaaaand vote!
Please pick as many as three (3) books you'd like to read along with:
- Backwards in High Heels: The Impossible Art of Being Female (Tania Kindersley and Sarah Vine) / self-help/humor (17%, 144 Votes)
- Consider the Lobster (David Foster Wallace) / essays (16%, 136 Votes)
- If You Have To Cry, Go Outside (Kelly Cutrone) / self-help/memoir (14%, 114 Votes)
- Shift (Jennifer Bradbury) / YA novel (12%, 103 Votes)
- The Turn of the Screw (Henry James) / classic (11%, 94 Votes)
- Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: True Tales of Love, Lust, and Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men (ed. Melissa de la Cruz and Tom Dolby) / sociology/essays (10%, 81 Votes)
- The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga (Doris Kearns Goodwin) / history/bio (7%, 57 Votes)
- Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus (Anthony Storr) / psychology (6%, 53 Votes)
- Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards (Josh Wilker) / baseball/memoir (4%, 32 Votes)
- The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World (Joshua Prager) / baseball (2%, 15 Votes)
Total Voters: 382
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Tags: books I don't know who Mike is but I do know he's naked from the waist up Pamie shut up technology The TN Read-Along
I only took my shirt off to keep things moving during the WiFi glitch. Pamie, made me do it. I hope everyone enjoyed my pasty belly.
Rooting for the Wallace. I’ve had him on the “mean to read, I swear!” list forever.
Oh, please don’t pick James. I have tried so many times to read Turn of the Screw and his other works, and can barely get through the first 5 pages. I don’t know what it is, but I want to stab Henry James with a fork.
@Heather: I’ve had the same experience with James. The classics on my to-read pile are largely books I feel like I should have read in order to be a full citizen of the culture, but…here we are with them still unread, so basically I’m looking for reading-slog buddies to make it bearable. Heh.
Oh god, anything but Turn of the Screw.
Five summers ago, I forced myself through The Portrait of a Lady. MISTAKE. Not a good way to spend a summer. So horribly boring and thick and dull. James + Summer = NO.
I mean, James + Any Season might also = NO, but I can’t say for certain because I will never try again.
I believe it was Virginia Woolf who said reading James was “like being entombed in a block of smooth amber.”
What is it with certain authors? It seems like there’s no one who can stand them, yet they’re still condsidered essential and if you haven’t read them you’re not the person you should be.
However, I will say that Turn of the Screw was made into a kickass, genuinely unsettling movie: The Innocents. So maybe it’s not so bad?
I generally feel the same way about James, but Turn of the Screw is the ONE thing of his I do enjoy. Also made a pretty awesome movie (retitled “The Innocents”) with Deborah Kerr.
Have you read Hamlet yet Sars?
Wallace! Wallace! Where’s Wallace, String?!
Kelly Cutrone! I am unreasonably infatuated with her efficiency, although I’m not positive I’d enjoy a whole book by her. Maybe she can do a live chat like Pamela? Even if it’s not for her book–I’d love to hear her take on Henry James.
@rick: Nope!
@Angie: On Friday Night Lights, D.
I have to go librarying for the readalong since I have no more room for books — I have nine and soon twelve stacked on my desk awaiting shelf space that doesn’t exist. So I hope whichever wins the poll is actually in my state library network (which Going in Circles was not, alas).
Of course the one book I own, unread, on the list, The Echoing Green, is at the bottom. Sigh.
I don’t mind James’s short stories so much. It’s the novels where his wordiness and lack of action just become unbearable to me.
As an English major, I had to read a lot of books I wouldn’t have picked up on my own. And I finished them dutifully, EXCEPT for Portrait of a Lady. I got within about 75 pages of the end, skipped ahead to read the ending, wanted to kill Isabel Archer, and never read the rest.
HATE.
I did not vote for The Turn of the Screw, but I will say the production my company did this season of Britten’s opera was pretty incredible.
Dear goodness, please not Henry James. Although, if it does come to that, could we possibly have a couple “checkpoints” along the way instead of leaving the whole thing like we did with Going in Circles?
I made it to the end of the movie version of Portrait of A Lady and wanted to kill Jane Campion; does that count?
Well, I wanted to kill Nichole Kidman’s hair. It’s hair, not symbolism, woman! What was that giant pile of brown-varnished bread on top of your skull? Marriage to John Malkovich does strange things.
Consider the Lobster read like a bunch of musings by an author who was really in love with his own (shallow, commonplace) insights. I mean, David Sedaris may be a little too self-involved, but at least he knows how to tell a good story. Wallace couldn’t even do that.