GONE WITH THE WIND- Discussion

So, I've finished reading this whopping 600 page epic!
And here's a couple of discussion questions for those of you who have already read this.

1. Do you think Creta Kano and Kumiko are actually the same person?

2. If so, why?

3. If not, what do you make, and how do you interpret, Creta Kano's one night stand with Toru Okada, and her wearing Kumiko's clothes, and having the exact same body shape etc.?

What are we reading???

Nice to see a few more people on the family list. So lets decide what to read for this month? I brought my copy of Gone with the wind but I'm guessing we are not going to read that any more since the manly man have spoken! I'm up for any book if the reader is a classic lets go for it!

Lets decide soon so that we can read this month's book and since feb is a short month we have less time!

A fun writing exercise...

I give you a prompt, and you each write the next bit, with a dangler for the next person to continue. What are they called? Story chains? they can be very funny...

Ok, here's the prompt.

Greg Samson woke up and discovered, much to his dismay, that he had sprouted two extra hands and two extra legs, and with his bloated torso, he could now safely say he resembled a corpulent spider. He...

Final Reading List (feel free to add additional books!)

1.Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
2. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
3. Ismail Kadare, Broken April
4. Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness
5. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
6. Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses or Midnight's Children
7. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged
8. George Orwell, 1984 or Animal Farm
9. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
10. Anything by Thomas Pynchon
11. Sophie's Choice, William Styron
12. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
13. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
14. The Sound and The Fury or As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
15. Herzog, Saul Bellow
16. John Dos Passos, Rosinante to the Road Again
17. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (SEVEN VOLUMES!!)
18. Ulysses, James Joyce
19. Metamorphoses, Ovid
20. The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy (3 books)
21. The Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment by Dostoeveysky
22. Lolita- Vladimir Nabokov
23. The Bluest Eye- Toni Morrison
24. A Clockwork Orange- Anthony Burgess
25. The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck
26. A Room With a View or A Passage to India - E.M Forster
27. The Ginger Man- J.P. Donleavy
28. The Color Purple- Alice Walker
29. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
30. A fine balance or Family matters by Rohinton Mistry
31. Of mice and men John Steinbeck
32. The autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X or Nelson Mandela autobiography
33. The communist manifesto by Karl Marx
34. A death of a salesman or a view from the bridge by Arthur Miller
35. One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

36. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
37. Arabian Nights/ one thousand and one nights by ANON
38. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
39. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
40. Kafka on the shore or The wind- up bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
41. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams
42. Spy In House Of Love: V4 In Nin'S Continuous Novel - Anais Nin
43. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
44. To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee
45. On the road by Jack Kerouac

I'm adding two more (they are on my list, but if anyone wants to join):

46. Don Quixote, Cervantes
47. Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

After one of us has read something on this list, feel free to change the font color! Let's see how much we achieve in a year.

Is it to be Gone With The Wind or something else?

Compiling A List of Wanna-Reads

Some help compiling your list?

Penguin

LibraryThing

Random House

Listology

My list:
1. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
2. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
3. Ismail Kadare, Broken April
4. Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness
5. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
6. Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses
7. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged
8. George Orwell, 1984 or Animal Farm
9. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
10. Anything by Thomas Pynchon
11. Sophie's Choice, William Styron
12. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
13. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
14. The Sound and The Fury, William Faulkner
15. Herzog, Saul Bellow
16. John Dos Passos, Rosinante to the Road Again

(These last ones, I suspect I am on my own!)
16. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (SEVEN VOLUMES!!)
17. Ulysses, James Joyce
18. Metamorphoses, Ovid
19. The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy (3 books)
20. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoeveysky

There is one book I will not regret not reading before I croak.
War and Peace, Tolstoy. Nuh uh. No way. No how.

What's the big idea???

Blame Samina Dossani. It's her big idea. But a great one.

Let's start a book club. It's not open to anyone outside the clan (I've disabled google searches etc.).

But it is open and should be to anyone within the family related by blood or marriage who wants to participate in lively discussions about reading the "Greats". Ok, we debated whether to stick to classics, but apparently reading only dead people don't get you youngsters excited.

So, the idea is that we read about 25 books this year (about one every two weeks) from a list we will compile together -- basically, classics or greats that you want to read before you die (not meant to be morbid -- the main benefit is that you will be able to claim in literate conversations that "Yes, I have read that, and here's what I think", but also that we know we always say we want to read this or that but one year passes after another, and we never get around to it, because we think we have all the time in the world.) Sometimes, we don't.

This is meant to be fun, so no pressure to read if life is just crazy for you, but if no one reads, this blog circle will also die. So, let's start reading. In memory of your Dadi/Nanima, I thought it'd be nice to start with a classic that Papa said she loved. Apparently, there were three (at least). Let's vote on it!

-- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
-- Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
-- The Three Muskateers, Alexandre Dumas

Orders of business:
1. Anyone else I've not invited who might like to join? If anyone on this current list would like to be off, just email me. That's ok too.
2. Please list also in your comments what other "greats" or "classics" you might want to read before ***, and I'll start with mine in next post.

Hope you all join in!