Below you will find the three novels nominated for the fiction discussion for June and July. Please take at look at the books, read the descriptions and links provided for each and vote on which book of fiction you would like to read and feel would make the best discussion.
To be eligible to vote, members must have at least 25 posts and plan on participating in the discussion. Each member has three votes. Voters can apply all three votes to one book, or split votes between books. The voting takes place right here. Please feel free to state the reasons why you have chosen your favorite.
Anthill
EO Wilson
From Robert Tulip's Review
In an amazingly distinguished career, Edward O. Wilson has won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Ants, founded the philosophical movements of sociobiology and consilience, and led scientific debate about how humanity relates to nature. Anthill, set in his home state of Alabama in the deep south of the USA, is Wilson’s first novel, and represents a return to his social roots and an effort to distil the scientific and political messages learned over his long and productive life. What I loved about Anthill was the depth of insight in Wilson’s cultural, scientific and symbolic messages, and the combination of a radical ecological vision of nature conservation with a conservative respect for social institutions and incremental evolutionary change as the only way to get things done.
The theme of Anthill is man versus nature. Wilson wants to show how society can change towards a more sustainable attitude. His main character, Raff Cody, is something of a Huckleberry Finn, growing to know and love the wetlands and forests of his home district of Nokobee, much as Wilson did himself when he was a boy. Raff’s question is how he can preserve biodiversity against the onslaught of progress and development. The message of Anthill is that lasting results are achieved only by bringing the conservative ruling forces of money and power along, converting them to see the economic benefits of conservation. Where Wilson sought in his own life to protect nature through science, in his imagined career he puts Raff Cody into the law.
Wilson takes this problem of nature conservancy as the basis for a series of parables. Foremost is the need for cooperation, negotiation, compromise and understanding as the basis to achieve any lasting practical outcomes. The anthill of the title is not just the ants of Nokobee, but the whole of human society. The ruthless pressure of evolution has taught ants what they must do to function as a super-organism, providing a template for how humanity must cooperate to prosper over time.
Learn more at:
http://www.amazon.com/Anthill-Novel-Edw ... 0393071197
THE GLASS BEAD GAME
Hermann Hesse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_GameThe Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date, centuries into the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator writing around the start of the 25th century.[2] The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools for boys, and to nurture and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school within Castalia known as Waldzell. The rules of the game are only alluded to, and are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. Essentially the game is an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics.
The Glass Bead Game, for which Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, is the author’s last and crowning achievement, the most imaginative and prophetic of all his novels. Setting the story in the distant postapocalyptic future, Hesse tells of an elite cult of intellectuals who play an elaborate game that uses all the cultural and scientific knowledge of the Ages. The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.
Learn more at:
http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Bead-Game-M ... 080501246X
The Golden Ass
Lucius Apuleius
Product Description
About the AuthorWritten towards the end of the second century AD, "The Golden Ass" tells the story of the many adventures of a young man whose fascination with witchcraft leads him to be transformed into a donkey. The bewitched Lucius passes from owner to owner - encountering a desperate gang of robbers and being forced to perform lewd 'human' tricks on stage - until the Goddess Isis finally breaks the spell and Lucius is initiated into her cult. Apuleius' enchanting story has inspired generations of writers such as Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Keats with its dazzling combination of allegory, satire, bawdiness and sheer exuberance, and remains the most continuously and accessibly amusing book to have survived from Classical antiquity.
Learn more at:Lucius Apuleius (2nd Century AD) North African fubulist, who Latinized the Greek myths and legends. He travelled widely, visiting Italy, Asia &c and was there initiated into numerous religious mysteries. The knowledge which he thus acquired of the priestly fraternities he drew on for his Golden Ass. E.J. Kenney is Emeritus Kennedy Professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge. His publications include a critical edition of Ovid's amatory works. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Ass-Pengui ... 0140435905
