Manifesto

Do you remember back in oldde thymes, you used to read books for fun? How about back in high school, the last time you read something and were excited about a new idea? But then, when you have that first encounter with serious literature something goes right and something goes wrong. With some effort, those types of books (Ulysses or something) probably are pretty rewarding. But the problem is this: you look at the sheer number of "Great Books" and decide you can't waste time on fun books. You read two or three more "Great Books" and then, because reading is no longer fun, you stop reading. After all you've got work to do, "real" work, scientific work. Screw the great books, I just want to read good books and have some fun with it. I have enough boring stuff to read as it is.

So to sum up: the first paragraph boils down to a few prescriptions for books. As they will be picked by members, but then unilaterally approved by myself I'll just give some guidelines. None of these: Koontz, S. King, Grisham, J.K. Rowling, etc. Anyone who reads these authors will read them anyway. And don't even get me started on these: James Joyce, Tolstoy, Beowulf, etc. In fact, let me just rule out Russian authors before 1950. We can't spend the first 20 minutes of a meeting working out that Rodion, Romanovich, Raskolnikov, Rodya, or Rodka, are all names referring to one person. Anyway, I'm talking about good contemporary fiction. I don't need to wait 100 years to be sure it's a classic. Maybe it's not, that's OK. But it should be interesting enough that you wouldn't be able to talk about it with your senile grandmother. We will occasionally toss up the genres and do things that are either not fiction, or not "legitimate fiction".

Call to Arms

All you have to do is join the mailing list and you'll know what's what. Go ahead, what could one more mailing list hurt? You spend all day reading email anyway, is one more email per week (approx.) going to kill you?