/sfl out – on the floor of DEN

I like Dodger’s proposed idea for selection process, but I think a week is too long to ruminate. People should get their suggestions in to us by 10 pm Eastern of the 1st Saturday of the month (i.e. tonight), we’ll announce all of the suggestions on a post Sunday morning (i.e. tomorrow), and people will have until noon Eastern on Monday to debate and make their vote (or rank their choices). Then using some top-secret selection process of the finalists, Cynica and I will announce the pick and I’m sure Nojo will make a handy side-bar link to Amazon to buy the book if you don’t have an independent book store to support.

Then the next first Sunday of the month (i.e. June something) we can start it all over again with the selection process as well as having the thread serve as the discussion of the book.

Those of you who never participated, maybe you’ll be less shy on Stinque. And maybe some Stinque lurkers will sign on for this.

How does this sound?

@Mistress Cynica: Whenever I see a Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings movie, I say to Son of RML (a) why are there all these old hippies in these movies? (b) Magneto! (c) that dude was great in Die Hard.

@FlyingChainSaw: Kingmakers-The Invention of the Modern Middle East, Meyer and Brysac (2008). Really good read so far. I also have some Chinese book someone loaned me about some cat hiding out from the cultural revolution in the sticks and hangin with the homies there.

@Benedick: I’m hooked on history and politics. I was crushed to hear that Robert Caro is still three years away from putting out his next volume in his life of Lyndon Johnson.

Gonna see the Wolverine movie today, going turkey hunting tomorrow, assuming I can reach the landowner to let him know I’m coming. Plan B – unscouted national forest near a game ranch east of Pecos.

I love fiction. Right now I’m reading T.C. Boyle’s latest, “The Women”, about Frank Lloyd Wright’s various amores. Unsurprisingly, it starts out with a Japanese narrator – Boyle has a fascination (fixation?) with things Japanese.

So, to disabuse Lefty of the notion that Breeders ain’t Readers, not true!. We just don’t have as much time for it; I’m lucky if I get 30 minutes of book reading in at night before falling asleep. One of my many joys of parenting is watching my kids become early and strong readers; Jr. read all Harry Potter books before he turned 7 (I only read the first, out loud, to him), and routinely checks five or more books out of the public library.

I think it’s a great pity we all don’t read more fiction. I include myself. I’m trying to read more of it having become exhausted by non. I went through a couple of years reading everything Virago published – back when it was doing its thing by publishing women whose books had fallen out of print. Personally I loathe Bloomsbury and everything connected with it. Ditto Algonquin. I read libraries of sci-fi at one time. I could read it again. I read The Road. Very well imagined apart from the uplift at the end. The only time I don’t read is when I’m working. Which is what I’m going to go and do now.

Then again, I have to fess up to Harry Potter. But only for the allegory, mind you.