Tomato Nation Read-Along #4: Poll
Now that we’ve emerged from the shadow of the golden raintree (…hew), it’s time to pick our next book. Please also let me know in the comments if you’d like to do a live chat about Audrina, but then again, maybe you’d rather just forget all about it, in which case I’ll just tell you you’re two years younger than you actually are and make you sit in a creepy rocking chair and channel your dead sister who is actually you while I Do It with all your female relatives. Just don’t go in the woods, ‘kay?
(Blerf!)
You’ll see the new poll list below. The David Foster Wallace is back for another shot at it, plus the Bryson, a Pynchon, a book about booze, a book about oilmen, and the unclassifiable but awesome Cometbus. (To the two other people who will care about this: he opened a bookstore in Williamsburg?! Don’t move, I’m-a get the car.) Voting’s open all week.
Please pick as many as three (3) books you'd like to read along with:
- Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words (Bill Bryson) / humor/language (19%, 132 Votes)
- Jacob Have I Loved (Katherine Paterson) / fiction (18%, 129 Votes)
- Consider the Lobster (David Foster Wallace) / essays (16%, 110 Votes)
- I Wish There Was Something That I Could Quit (Aaron Cometbus) / fiction (11%, 78 Votes)
- Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva (The Eighteenth-Century Gin Craze) (Patrick Dillon) / history/cultural studies (11%, 74 Votes)
- Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life (Allen Shawn) / autobiography (8%, 56 Votes)
- Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (John M. Barry) / history (6%, 44 Votes)
- Survival In Auschwitz (Primo Levi) / autobiography/history (6%, 39 Votes)
- Inherent Vice (Thomas Pynchon) / fiction (4%, 29 Votes)
- The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes (Bryan Burrough) / history (2%, 12 Votes)
Total Voters: 343
Loading ...
Tags: Cometbus David Foster Wallace The TN Read-Along Thomas Pynchon
I just read Consider the Lobster, so I would love to discuss it with the fabulous, intelligent readers of Tomato Nation.
Jacob Have I Loved has long been one of my favorite books. It’s just so beautiful and sad and wonderful.
I love Aaron Cometbus with the passion of a thousand white-hot sons. Dude lives out here in the Bay Area (East Bay!) and is actually really cool. He is indeed unclassifiable. If you ever get the chance to see one of his eight hozillion bands live, do so.
Katherine Paterson was my favorite author as a youngster, Jacob Have I Loved was by far my favorite of hers. She gave a talk at my college years ago and she’s a lovely woman.
For years, I would get Jacob Have I Loved, Bridge To Terabithia, and A Separate Peace all mixed up in my mind. I’ve reread Terabithia and Peace in the last few years, so I have those straight; JHIL is the only one I have no memory of.
I’m pretty psyched to read any of these, but I will say that I think the only way I will even attempt the Pynchon is if it’s a TN Read-Along.
Gin No. 209 is a damn good gin.
PS how about “The Chocolate War”?
I’ve been wanting to read Shawn’s bio – good choice.
Aaron Cometbus has a bookstore?? That’s awesome. Also awesome is the fact that I know some people in the picture in the About Us section. I suddenly feel very cool. It will pass.
Hmm…Cometbus or Bryson? Tough call.
Jacob Have I Loved pissed me off royally as a teenager, when my sense of right and wrong and honor and such was very highly developed and entirely untested. It would be interesting to reread it as a mature adult. What? I’m mature! Here, count my rings!
Honestly I’m leaning towards Lobster or the Bryson, though. Lobster because I want to read it, the Bryson because I already own it.
I wish I owned some of these … I keep requesting the readalong books from the library (when it has them, that is) and getting them a week after the readalong ends. D’oh! I’m certainly not reading My Sweet Audrina by myself.
@Jenak: Sorry about that! The threads will remain open indefinitely, though, so you’re welcome to comment whenever you get around to it.
I was trying to explain to my friend H. Rock, who is 13, that for women of a certain generation, V.C. Andrews was almost required reading despite being creepy and poorly written. I was feeling like kind of a bad god-aunt for telling her what Andrews is best known for, but then, in the same conversation, H. revealed that she wasn’t crazy about the film version of The Lovely Bones because of what they cut out of it to get the PG-13 rating.
Sarah: “Yeah, that was one of the problems with the fi– waaaaait wait wait YOU read that book?! But I’M too young to read that book! With the…thing? That happened?”
H.: “Um, siblings Doing It?”
Sarah: “…Good point.”
in the same conversation, H. revealed that she wasn’t crazy about the film version of The Lovely Bones because of what they cut out of it to get the PG-13 rating.
Sarah: “Yeah, that was one of the problems with the fi– waaaaait wait wait YOU read that book?! But I’M too young to read that book! With the…thing? That happened?”
H.: “Um, siblings Doing It?”
Sarah: “…Good point.”
Yeah, that book is on the 11th grade summer reading list in my district. While I appreciate the attempt to move beyond the pantheon of Dead White Guys, not so much the direction I would have chosen. Though perhaps H has just proved me wrong.
No, no, no to Jacob Have I Loved! I haven’t read it since junior high and parts of it still pop into my head. Junior High was in the eighties, so it’s been awhile. Seeing it from an adult perspective might be interesting, but I don’t want it to get a stronger hold on my mind.
I just had to vote for Jacob Have I Loved because I just reread it last week (seriously!) and have been bursting with comments since:-) It was the first time I read it in English, too, because I’ve had it in translated version since I was a kid. It was well translated, but I liked reading the original. Wee paws, heh:-)
I love you guys! When I clicked my vote for “Jacob Have I Loved” I fully expected it to be at the bottom. Not here! I have read most of KAtherine Paterson’s books, and that one has always been my favorite. In fact, I even excerpted a section of it for my monologue in a high school speaking contest (and placed 3rd!).