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Willing to do the bookclub (on a weekly basis) - Need all of your suggestions.

Hey !bookworms

I figured if I can spend 5-6 hours a week watching reruns of old sitcoms, i might as well spend an hour on a bookclub in rdrama.

I have a few conditions though

Barred:

B.1. No classics (no Steinbeck, Harper, Borges, Hemingway, Conan Doyle etc). Doing a bookclub posts on their works is, frankly, well just circlejerking.

B.2. No modern hipster "I-went-to-Private-College" author (Franzen, DeLillo, Yanigihara, DFW, etc).

B.3. Goes without saying - "I'm too smart ie a neckbeard" type obnoxious people who recommend textbooks

Not Barred:

N.B.1. Really good fiction. Examples:

N.B.1.1 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - A recasting of "David Copperfield," narrated by an Appalachian boy whose wise, unwavering voice relates his encounters with poverty, addiction, institutional failures and moral collapse–and his efforts to conquer them.

N.B.1.2 Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

N.B.2. Really good biographies of interesting people written by really smart authors - Presidents (the lesser known ones especially), Industrialists (Vanderbilt, Joseph Kennedy Sr.), Generals (Omar Bradley, Nimitz, King etc), Scientists (Vannevar Bush).

N.B.3. Science Fiction (must be smartly written, the concept maybe dumb and unscientific). Think more "Story of your life" by Chiang and Jurassic Park by Crichton than whatever the heck Dune (too much on the nose) or Three Body Problem (trying to cover up lazy writing style with science) is.

N.B.4. I really don't want to but... History and General Nonfiction. Keep in mind Rule B.1 and B.3 still applies. No lame books like Sapiens or Guns, Germs and Steel. Neither are books like "Introduction to XYZ. An objective approach". Leave your autism out of this.

cc: @nuclearshill and @binturong (to pin this for 24 hours on /h/lit )

Edit: BARRED ON PUBLIC DEMAND: ANY NOVEL WITH 250+ PAGE.

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We need short stories or novellas. We don't have the attention span for anything longer.

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Agreed, something with fewer than 200 pages. Chekhov has great novellas and short stories for instance and they follow simple plots.

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I am in for this I need something new to read that isn't too long

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Honestly you guys should just read one short story a week to ensure this even happens. Like start with Carver's Cathedral or something then go from there.

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Mention some of your favorites.

However, you should keep in mind that there are several novels of 300+ pages which are so small in dimension (6X8 inches) that if you downloaded a kindle version and read it in a macbook the page count would get cut in half or even more.

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Also

>no Borges

He's among the best 20th century authors and his stories are great, especially the ones in Ficciones, I also loved his poems from El Hacedor :#marseyargentina:

However I can't attest for the quality of translations, I read them in Spanish.

I think you should veto long novels, works like Moby Peepee are great but dramatards wont read it.

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