FREE/BARGAIN — Fiction (everything else)

[ZodWallop]

Old School by Tobias Wolff is $2.99 at Amazon US.

The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.

The agency of revelation is the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I consider myself to be very well read on Steinbeck, but somehow I've never read Cannery Row or The Pearl.

Cannery Row moved me more than any other of his books. I'm a BIG fan of this book. The movie version was . . . eh, OK. It got the broad strokes reasonably well but did nothing for the true meat of the book.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

Cannery Row moved me more than any other of his books. I'm a BIG fan of this book. The movie version was . . . eh, OK. It got the broad strokes reasonably well but did nothing for the true meat of the book.

Read the Wikipedia article of the film. Apparently, the head of MGM regretted it. He thought the script was fantastic and the director just wasn't up to the task of doing it justice.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

The Short Novels of John Steinbeck is $2.99 at Amazon US. It includes:

• Tortilla Flat
• The Moon Is Down
• The Red Pony
• Of Mice and Men
• Cannery Row
• The Pearl

I consider myself to be very well read on Steinbeck, but somehow I've never read Cannery Row or The Pearl.

Still $2.99 at amazon. I'm sure it will eventually go up, but I'm somewhat stunned that separately these short novels are $10 to $13 each.

[sufue]

Welcome to the world of John Steinbeck titles in the US . His books do go on sale somewhat often in the UK, usually for £0.99, if you are willing to travel, but this is quite a bargain for the US.

And yep, still hanging in at $2.99 as of the time of this reply...

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Still $2.99 at amazon. I'm sure it will eventually go up, but I'm somewhat stunned that separately these short novels are $10 to $13 each.

[ReadingManiac]

Originally Posted by issybird

The Pearl is skippable, but Cannery Row is key. IMHO, of course.

I disagree. I read The Pearl in school and I still think of it often. I think it actually got me into the Horror genre.

[Froide]

Originally Posted by issybird

The Pearl is skippable, but Cannery Row is key. IMHO, of course.

Originally Posted by ReadingManiac

I disagree. I read The Pearl in school and I still think of it often. I think it actually got me into the Horror genre.

I concur with ReadingManiac. I read the book in junior high school English class, and it has stuck with me. (In contrast to ReadingManiac, however, I was already a horror aficionado, having been exposed to the likes of such authors as William Peter Blatty, Shirley Jackson, and Edgar Allan Poe.)

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Froide

I concur with ReadingManiac. I read the book in junior high school English class, and it has stuck with me.

I think reading a book in class makes a bigger impact because you are naturally getting more out of it than you would reading the same book for pleasure.

[ZodWallop]

Maurice by E.M. Forster is 2.99 at Amazon US.

‘Publishable – but worth it?’ are the words of E M Forster, inscribed on the cover of the typescript of his novel, Maurice.

Written in 1914 by the Nobel Prize–nominated author of Howard’s End, this intimate portrait of homosexual desire “seems as relevant as ever” (The Guardian).

From early adolescence to his college years at Cambridge and into professional life at his father’s firm, Maurice Hall plays the part of the conventional Englishman. All the while, he harbors a secret wish to lose himself from society and embrace who he truly is.

Maurice’s first love, Clive Durham, introduces him to the ancient Greeks who embraced same-sex attraction. But when Clive marries a woman, Maurice is distraught enough to seek a hypnotist who might “cure” him of his homosexuality. In his quest to accept his true self, Maurice must ultimately go against the grain of society’s unspoken rules of class, wealth, and politics.

Though Forster completed Maurice in 1914, he left instructions for it be published only after his death. Since its release in 1971, Maurice has been widely praised and adapted for major stage productions as well as the 1987 Oscar-nominated film adaptation starring Hugh Grant and James Wilby.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Read the Wikipedia article of the film. Apparently, the head of MGM regretted it. He thought the script was fantastic and the director just wasn't up to the task of doing it justice.

I can see that. The movie felt a bit like a series pilot for a 'Dramedy' where the place is kinda quirky and so are its inhabitants. A terrible fate for a book of serious intent.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Froide

I concur with ReadingManiac. I read the book in junior high school English class, and it has stuck with me. (In contrast to ReadingManiac, however, I was already a horror aficionado, having been exposed to the likes of such authors as William Peter Blatty, Shirley Jackson, and Edgar Allan Poe.)

It's fantastic when a curriculum can match books of literary merit to the students' interest. Just the same, I'm not sure that a book which fit a junior high school reading and comprehension level is in the same ballpark as Cannery Row, which would not have been suitable. This is why I said that The Pearl is skippable for the adult reader now. Not of course that I criticize anyone for liking it or preferring it, but I think objectively speaking, Cannery Row is much more important in the Steinbeck canon.

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I think reading a book in class makes a bigger impact because you are naturally getting more out of it than you would reading the same book for pleasure.

I don't think that's necessarily true.

[ReadingManiac]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I think reading a book in class makes a bigger impact because you are naturally getting more out of it than you would reading the same book for pleasure.

I was a skim-and-fake-it student. The pearl was one of the few assigned books I actually enjoyed reading!

[sufue]

I hated having to read (fiction) books for class. I had to go at the class speed, not mine, and sometimes had to analyze books to the point of not enjoying them anymore. If I feel like "settling" for enjoying a rip-roaring good story instead of looking for the fifth level of meaning, that's I want to do.

My favorite example is The Hobbit, which we had in one of my middle school classes. By that time, I had probably read it maybe five times on my own, as well as all three Lord of the Rings books, but I ended up flunking one quiz on it because I had no idea what had happened in Chapter X, as opposed to Chapter X-1, or X+1, or X+2, since I knew the book so well that I didn't read it by chapters. So my answer described what happened partly in Chapter X and partly in some other chapters, and the teacher felt that meant I hadn't been "taking my assignments seriously".

For me, at least, assigning books tended to ruin them for me...at least temporarily.

I still love Tolkien's books, BTW, but it took a little while to recover from having The Hobbit in class .

[sufue]

Rolling Thunder is a western by Paul Lederer (pen name Owen G. Irons). It is the BN Readouts Free Friday book (typically free for the weekend, not just Friday), and is matched at Kindle US, but not at Kobo US, at least as of now.

You can always price match it at Kobo if you want it there instead of BN, which I totally do when the Free Friday book isn't free at Kindle also. Just make sure you save screenshots of it as free at BN - after having pretty good luck with Kobo's price matching for a long time, several times recently I've had to send them the screenshots.

BN US: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/rol...=9781480487888
Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Rolling-Thund...dp/B00K5EBDKC/
Kobo US (for price check/match): https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/rolling-thunder-15

Spoiler:

A settler returns to the town he founded to burn it to the ground

When Tom Quinn first came to the little patch of prairie that would become Stratton, it wasn’t paradise, but it was close. The town he built there was beautiful in a humble way, an honest Western village where hardworking settlers came to make new lives. When Tom moved on, he left a happy town behind him. And then a man called Shelley Peebles came and turned it into hell.

Backed up by a gang of hired guns, Peebles pushed out the small landowners, using money and muscle to corrupt the village and its people. Only one man stood in his way—the veteran gunman Tyler Holt—and so Peebles used his influence to have Holt lynched. This outrage brings Quinn back to the town he loved so much—not to save it, but to wipe it off the earth.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by sufue

You can always price match it at Kobo if you want it there instead of BN, which I totally do when the Free Friday book isn't free at Kindle also. Just make sure you save screenshots of it as free at BN - after having pretty good luck with Kobo's price matching for a long time, several times recently I've had to send them the screenshots.

My preference these days is not to download/strip/backup, but just to let my purchases download to my Kobos. However, when a price is cheaper at Kindle, I still don't price match as it doesn't seem worth the potential nuisance of dealing with Kobo CS, nor the exposure of not getting the matching credit when a book is very much more expensive at Kobo.