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HAF Book Club: August poll and discussion

Started by Sandra Craft, July 17, 2020, 11:14:38 PM

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Sandra Craft

The Final Solution: a story of detection, by Michael Chabon.  Retired to the English countryside, an eighty-nine-year old man, rumored to be a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man.  Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot.  (131 pages)

Mrs. Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls.  In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to come home from work, not in the least anticipating romance, she hears a strange radio announcement about a monster who has just escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research.  (111 pages)

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.  A boldly imagined future in which no hope remains, but in which a father and his young son are sustained by love.  (241 pages)

The Reporter, by Scott Sigler.  The Reporter follows Yolanda Davenport, a reporter for Galaxy Sports Magazine, as she searches for the truth about Ju Tweedy's involvement with the murder of Grace McDermott - the incident that drove Ju to join the Ionath Krakens. The Reporter takes place between week three and week six of the 2684 Galactic Football League season, the season that encompasses The All-Pro.  (138 pages)

Tselane, by J. Louw Van Wijk.  Tselane -- young, beautiful and popular with her isolated South African mountain tribe -- is about to bear her first child, while her husband, Khama, goes away to work in the white men's mines.  When the tribe's young chief seeks magic from the old medicine man to cure his wife's childlessness, Tselane is chosen to be the victim of the ritual murder necessary to make the magic work.  (211 pages)

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.  After a swine flu pandemic kills most of the world's population, a young woman struggles to survive and help rebuild civilization. (333 pages)

Under the Skin, by Michel Faber
An extraterrestrial is sent to Earth by a rich corporation on her planet to kidnap unwary hitchhikers. She drugs them and delivers them to her compatriots, who mutilate and fatten her victims so that they can be turned into meat, a very expensive delicacy on the aliens' barren homeworld. (311 pages)
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Davin

I don't vote for the same things every time, my mood changes between votes.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Sandra Craft

Quote from: Davin on July 20, 2020, 03:47:21 PM
I don't vote for the same things every time, my mood changes between votes.

Same here.  Today I voted based on what stories I thought wouldn't depress me. 
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Sandra Craft

It's a tie again.  I notice we had 3 people voting this month, so will the person who's neither Davin nor me please flip a coin and decide which one we'll be reading?
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Randy

I've flipped the coin - Station Eleven wins.
"Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff that happens." -- Homer Simpson
"Some people focus on the destination. Atheists focus on the journey." -- Barry Goldberg

Sandra Craft

Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Icarus

I choose Station Eleven also.   

I am a prolific reader but my library is on lock down.  It is a wonderful library that has many, if not most, of the current best sellers. I will not be able to get the chosen book but I am much in favor of this thread. 

Thank you for your efforts Sandy. You are a special person.

Sandra Craft

Quote from: Icarus on July 28, 2020, 01:33:17 AM
I choose Station Eleven also.   

I am a prolific reader but my library is on lock down.  It is a wonderful library that has many, if not most, of the current best sellers. I will not be able to get the chosen book but I am much in favor of this thread. 

Thank you for your efforts Sandy. You are a special person.

Thanks!  If you want to read it, it's not a recent book and you can probably get a cheap copy from ThriftBooks.com.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Sandra Craft

Here's my FB review:

I read this several years ago, but didn't mind reading it again for the book club's Year of Pandemic Stories fiction month.

The story starts in Toronto, Canada, with the on-stage death by heart attack of a famous actor.  Quite co-incidentally, this is also the eve of the Georgia (Russia) flu reaching the American continent and including it in the deaths of 99% of the Earth's human population that had already started in Europe and Asia.

Civilization ends almost overnight, but thank goodness Mandel doesn't dwell on that at all, just mentions it now and then to let us know it happened.

The story does flip back and forth in time a bit, but most of it is spent in Year 20 after the Collapse.  We're following the lives of survivors who knew or were somehow connected to the dead actor, chiefly one Kirsten Raymonde.  She had been an 8-year old child actor sharing a stage with the famous one the night of his death; between the confusion that caused and the beginning of the end it took her awhile to get home.  When she did it was to find only her older brother around, both their parents having vanished without a trace.  They spend the next four years on the road together until he dies of an infection that could have been easily cured if antibiotics still existed.

Eventually she's taken in by the Travelling Symphony, a collection of musicians and actors who go from settlement to settlement performing classical music and Shakespeare's plays in accordance with their ruling motto: "survival is insufficient".  (and top marks if you know where that comes from -- I didn't, and it was one of my favorite shows)

As you might imagine, they have some extremely hairy run-ins with feral humans and organized bastards, even after all this time when things are settling down a bit.  One of the worst is a character called The Prophet, a violent loon whose teachings are a mix of the Book of Revelations and a sci-fi graphic novel called Station Eleven.    All this ties in with everything, and everyone, else -- all the people and subplots I haven't mentioned because covering all that would pretty much involve re-writing the novel and none of us wants me to do that.

This is both a gritty depiction of the collapse of civilization and an inspiring one of the emergence of a new one.  As the novel ends, an elderly man who lives at an airport-turned-settlement looks thru a telescope in one of the airport towers and sees an electrical glow laid out in a grid pattern.  After 20 years, somebody at another settlement nearby has figured out how to turn the lights back on.

I thought the story was well-written and well-told (in fact, it was a finalist for a PEN/Faulkner award) but what I appreciated most about it was that it was uplifting without being whitewashed, and after the way 2020 has gone so far I really need that.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Davin

Well, I suppose I should write up my review. I really should have gone before Sandra, that is a good review.

The first thing I like to talk about is the writing style, because if that doesn't work for me I tend to have a difficult time reading the book. In this case, the writing is very well done. If does do some time jumping which is normally something that is jarring, but this author had pulled it off very nicely.

Also, the plot and events in the story are very well done in that there is an uplifting result without employing Deus Ex Machina to save anyone. Maybe a little Deus Ex Light. Nothing was pulled too far one way or the other, the events happened naturally. And that is something I see very rarely in all the books I've read.

I felt the whole sweet of emotions while reading this, happy, humor, sad, angry... etc.

To be fair I should list out the negatives, but I can't remember any.

The story follows the lives of a few people a little pre but mostly post apocalypse who are linked to a famous actor who died right before an epidemic killed off 99% of the world's population. The person who I consider the main protagonist was a child actor in the play where the famous actor died. She read and reread two books of the comic book series called Station Eleven. And you can see how those comics had shaped her decisions and outlook on life.

In contrast, the Prophet, who I would consider the main antagonist, was also shaped by the same comic book, as well as the bible book revelations, and we are shown how those two things affected his decisions into being a piece of shit bent on taking control of everything and turning what's left of the population into a death cult.

There are a lot of characters and events, but I feel like the main story spins around these two and how the comic book and the world effects their lives.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Davin

Quote from: Sandra Craft on August 30, 2020, 02:00:50 AM
Civilization ends almost overnight, but thank goodness Mandel doesn't dwell on that at all, just mentions it now and then to let us know it happened.
I felt the same way. I mean I enjoyed books that have gone into the details of the cataclysmic event, but I liked it being in the background of this book.

Also, it felt like the resulting humans were a lot more diverse and realistic than most post-apocalypse stories. There weren't only two groups of people (or three, because in those stories the middle-grounders are killed). And those kinds of extremistic dichotomies take me out of the story unless the story is not very serious.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Sandra Craft

Quote from: Davin on August 31, 2020, 08:39:02 PM
Quote from: Sandra Craft on August 30, 2020, 02:00:50 AM
Civilization ends almost overnight, but thank goodness Mandel doesn't dwell on that at all, just mentions it now and then to let us know it happened.
I felt the same way. I mean I enjoyed books that have gone into the details of the cataclysmic event, but I liked it being in the background of this book.

Also, it felt like the resulting humans were a lot more diverse and realistic than most post-apocalypse stories. There weren't only two groups of people (or three, because in those stories the middle-grounders are killed). And those kinds of extremistic dichotomies take me out of the story unless the story is not very serious.

Yes, it did feel very much like these are the people I'd be meeting on the road after civilization collapses.

I was glad the story didn't spend much time on the Prophet, a little of him went a long way.  And while I was bothered a little over not knowing what happened to Elizabeth, his mother, I think leaving her a mystery was the right way to go, irritant tho it was.  After all, lack of closure would be a huge part of life after the sudden end of civilization.

Of the various characters who died, I thought Miranda, the creator of the Station Eleven comics, got the best death -- if I had to be taken out by a pandemic, that's how I'd want to go.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Davin

Quote from: Sandra Craft on August 31, 2020, 11:42:02 PM
Quote from: Davin on August 31, 2020, 08:39:02 PM
Quote from: Sandra Craft on August 30, 2020, 02:00:50 AM
Civilization ends almost overnight, but thank goodness Mandel doesn't dwell on that at all, just mentions it now and then to let us know it happened.
I felt the same way. I mean I enjoyed books that have gone into the details of the cataclysmic event, but I liked it being in the background of this book.

Also, it felt like the resulting humans were a lot more diverse and realistic than most post-apocalypse stories. There weren't only two groups of people (or three, because in those stories the middle-grounders are killed). And those kinds of extremistic dichotomies take me out of the story unless the story is not very serious.

Yes, it did feel very much like these are the people I'd be meeting on the road after civilization collapses.

I was glad the story didn't spend much time on the Prophet, a little of him went a long way.  And while I was bothered a little over not knowing what happened to Elizabeth, his mother, I think leaving her a mystery was the right way to go, irritant tho it was.  After all, lack of closure would be a huge part of life after the sudden end of civilization.
I agree, the prophet had a lot of coverage, as a kid growing up and how he turned into the piece of shit, before it was confirmed that he was the prophet.

Quote from: Sandra Craft
Of the various characters who died, I thought Miranda, the creator of the Station Eleven comics, got the best death -- if I had to be taken out by a pandemic, that's how I'd want to go.
I think I kind of like how the actor went down, right before it even started.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.