Recorded 14 Dec 2009
Babblers: Bjorn, Renee, Marcel, Donny

Synopsis:

The group discusses their best reads of the year, plus some not-so-great reads as well.  Also, what books best defined the past decade, given all that has happened in the past 10 years?  Plus, Renee treats us to a wonderful rendition of bad sex prose, courtesy of this year’s winner of Literary Review’s 2009 bad sex in fiction award.

Show Length: 1:41:42 mins

Mentioned

• The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell
• Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1, Marcel Proust
• My Uncle Oswald, Roald Dahl
• Doctor Glas, Hjalmar Söderberg
• Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
• Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
• 2666, Roberto Bolaño
• Atemschaukel, Herta Müller
• The Land of Green Plums, Herta Müller
• The Passport, Herta Müller
• Landscape Painted with Tea, Milorad Pavic
• Song of Lawino & Song of Okol, Okot p’Bitek
• Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga
• The Restless Supermarket, Ivan Vladislavic
• Reine Pokou, Véronique Tadjo
• Sleepwalking Land, Mia Couto
• Leo Africanus, Amin Maalouf
• Replay, Ken Grimwood
• The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon
• Naked, David Sedaris
• The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
• The Death of Bunny Munro, Nick Cave
• The Walking Dead Vol1: The Days Gone By, Robert Kirkman
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
• The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perotta
• Left Behind, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
• Against The Day, Thomas Pynchon
• The collector of worlds, Ilya Troyanov
• When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger
• Colson Whitehead

Links

• Bad sex award goes to Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Literary Review)
• Véronique Tadjo
• “Den danske oversættelse af Atemschaukel udkommer på Gyldendal medio 2010.”
• Bjorn’s Review of Tom Perotta’s The Abstinence Teacher (forum)
• Shigekuni: Field Work: Ilija Trojanow’s “Der Weltensammler”
• Shigekuni: Gotham City: Colson Whitehead’s ”The Intuitionist”
• Shigekuni: Rotter: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides The Hurt”

Download the show here.

Synopsis:
You probably won’t know who Marcel is, who joined us a couple of episodes back.  But as we’re time traveling at the moment with Donny being behind on a couple episodes, suffice it to know that Marcel is *one of us*, and as with the other babblers, will dazzle you with his profound knowledge and book geekiness.  The group discusses what was read in the Bookbabble hiatus period, and goes from classics to accidental forays into fantasy to anime and other good stuff.

Show Length: 70:29 mins

Books Mentioned:

• Moby Dick, Herman Melville
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
• Hardboiled and Hard Luck, Banana Yoshimoto
• A Late Divorce, A.B. Yehoshua
• A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Review by Marcel)
• Batman: The Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul (Review by Marcel)
• Arkham Asylum, Grant Morrison
• Bill Sienkiewicz
• Gloriana, the Unfulfilled Queen, Michael Moorcock
• Mother London, Michael Moorcock
• Electra, Frank Miller

Links:

• Shigekuni

Download the show here.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C Foster
• How to Read a Novel: A User’s Guide, John Sutherland
• A Secret History, Donna Tartt
• The Little Friend, Donna Tartt
• The BFG, Roald Dahl
• Wuthering Heights
• Gone with the Wind
• Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
• Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
• Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow
• Asylum Piece, Anna Kaven
• The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Jose Saramago
• Demian, Herman Hesse
• Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
• Legends
• Legends II
• The Overcoat, Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol
• White Nights, Doestoyevsky
• Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Black Monk, Anton Chekov
• Chess, Stefan Zweig
• The Death of Ivan Illyich
• Answer, Friedich Brown
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
• Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
• Cutting It Short, Bohumil Hrabal
• A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen
• The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, Victor Pelevin and Andrew Bromfield
• The Sea, John Banville
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby

Show Length: 49:46 mins
Links:

• Michael Rosen: What I really said about Harry Potter
• Stephen King: The last word on Harry Potter

Download the show here.