Oooh! I was going to suggest The House of Sleep! It's a fantastic book.

My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki

I read this for my Gen X class. Great book.

hayden, I've heard wonderful things about The Intuitionist.

Oh yeah! All three of the modern litfic books were great reads, engrossing, sometimes funny, and full of little nuggets of illumination. The Nabokov is also about as much fun of a read as I can imagine, as Kinbote is the ultimate unreliable narrator and the novel has an, um, unusual structure. Perhaps the thing to do there is to read it and Mary McCarthy's essay about it, A Bolt From The Blue, subsequently.

Also, because I didn't include any Lethem or Crace or Pynchon:

• Girl In Landscape by Jonathan Lethem (although Motherless Brooklyn would also be a great read again)

Amazon: Science-fiction writers attempting coming-of-age stories have seldom risked showing the stew of loneliness, anger, and angst that really characterizes adolescence. Jonathan Lethem, on the other hand, avoids the plucky sidekick syndrome and instead gives us breathtakingly realistic Pella Marsh, a girl at that awful and wonderful crux in her life just before people start calling her "woman." Her broken family has just moved to a newly settled planet, with strange and passive natives and the decaying remnants of a great civilization. Something in the alien environment soon enables Pella to telepathically travel, hidden in the bodies of inconspicuous "household deer," into the homes of her fellow settlers. She inevitably discovers the seamy side of humanity--loss of innocence eloquently portrayed. Don't read this book on a dark day, as there's not very much sunshine in here. The entire planet is covered with ruins: ruined towns, ruined hopes and dreams, ruined families. For a rare dose of SF realism, this is a fantastic read, full of raw (but not explicit) sexuality and the unhappy hierarchies of childhood. Forget about cheerful settlers moving in next door to helpful indigenous life forms. This is what the planetary frontiers will be. No matter how far away from Earth we may travel, we'll still be the same dirty, disappointing, beautiful monsters.

• The Devil's Larder by Jim Crace (although Being Dead and Quarantine are recommended, too)

Amazon: In The Devil's Larder, Jim Crace has put together an odd and artful little volume that encompasses more of the human experience than it really ought to, given its size and scope. Crace presents us with 64 short fictions about food, which add up to a picture of life that is at once diabolical and innocent, creepily sexualized and free of judgment. In one fable, a mother and her small daughter twist their tongues together, ferreting out the food in each other's mouths: they want to know if food tastes the same from another person's tongue. A game of strip fondue ends with guests covered in burns where the molten cheese has fallen onto their naked flesh. "A gasp of pain. The whiff of sizzling flesh and hair and cheese." Flesh and cheese, that's the stuff. Crace shows us the odd outer limits of desire, and revels in the sheer weirdness of the daily act of eating. --Claire Dederer

• Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Amazon: Pynchon's first novel since the formidable Gravity's Rainbow (1973) more closely resembles his earlier work, especially The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). (In fact Mucho Maas, the ex-husband of Lot 49 's heroine, reappears in the new book.) Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story ), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V. ). Pynchon fans have waited 17 years for this novel, and they won't be disappointed. An essential purchase. - Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch . Lib., Los Angeles

A personal note on Vineland: It's not Pynchon's best work, but it's easily his funniest and probably the most accessible. I'd love to hear what y'all think about it.

Also, if it's greedy to suggest this many books, I'll gladly withdraw any of the above.

Wolfram - I actually can't find where the natter line was stompy supported. Seems the other way to me.

After it was pointed out that discouraging natter is against the FAQ in spirit if not in letter, Hec suggested a more positive spin on it.

Here's Hec's natter line: "While natter will inevitably happen, we encourage you to treat this like a virtual book club and try to keep your posts in that spirit."

I said I'd take the discouraging natter line out of the proposal and suggested we use Hec's language in the slug.

I guess I assumed because nobody objected to this it had the tacit approval of the stompies. But in re-read that may not be the case.

Then again, if someone objects to the desciption, that will likely come up in Burea when we ask for the slug, descrip. and subtitle. So, David's amended description, then?

I'll third Strega's nomination for The Good Soldier--read it for my modern lit class, and it's good for provoking great discussion about POV!

Then again, if someone objects to the desciption, that will likely come up in Burea when we ask for the slug, descrip. and subtitle. So, David's amended description, then?

Works for me.

yep, I mentioned The Good Soldier in book club a couple weeks ago, very interesting, weighty book. Not a quick read, though it's relatively short.

I think it'd be come a popularity contest

Well, the original idea of the Select the Selectors plan was that the selectors would be selected randomly. Sorta kills the popularity thing. But I'm not feeling the pushing urge.

I'm going out of town soon. Hope to check back and find a working book club when I get back! Good luck, everybody!

(Yay books.)