Literary The Zodiac • August 2020

[Bookworm_Girl]

It is a great list! I am going to give 1 vote each to the following:

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Porter
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
My Name Is Venus Black by Heather Lloyd
The North Water by Ian McGuire
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

[sun surfer]

First round voting is complete and after a month off, the run-off is back back back again! We have a tie between:

-The Hour of the Star
-My Name is Venus Black


Run-off voting is now open!

Voting will close exactly TWO DAYS from this post.

Each person has ONE vote to use.

If the run-off ends in a tie, the selection that received all its votes first will win.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I’ll give my vote to The Hour of the Star.

[AnotherCat]

I'll vote for The Hour of the Star too.


{Then I will have more time to read Lonesome Dove as well }

[Bookworm_Girl]

All the books sounded interesting. Length was the main reason why I eliminated Lonesome Dove from the list. I would like to read it someday. Also I am planning to start Inland by Tea Obrecht this week, which is historical fiction about the American West in the mid-to-late 1800s and set in Arizona Territory and Texas.

[AnotherCat]

Inland looks interesting and I might give it a go too.

I didn't know that there had been a US Camel Corps until just now seeing it being mentioned in relation to this book. It conjures up some interesting images in my mind .

There are a lot of wild camels in Australia, supposedly the largest population of them in the world (not that I have ever seem them as I have tended to stick to "civilization" when over there). At primary school, years ago, we were taught about the Australian Burke and Wills expedition (its intention was sort of like the much earlier US Lewis and Clark expedition, but Burke and Wills didn't survive theirs) and that camels and their riders were imported and first used for that. The expedition was around the same time as the US Camel Corps.

[sun surfer]

I'll also vote for The Hour of the Star.

I wasn't aware of either a US Camel Corps or camels in Australia!

The temptation is there for me to still try the audiobook of Lonesome Dove. It's long but the way Audible is set up, longer books are better values because it's that much longer before you need to use another credit. Also I enjoyed the audio preview more than I was expecting. But what really intrigued me is I looked up the author today and noticed he also wrote The Last Picture Show. I didn't even know there was a book, let alone by the author of Lonesome Dove. The Last Picture Show is a fantastic film. It also happened to feature a lot of young actors that became famous (Jeff Bridges, Cybil Shepherd, Randy Quaid), and Cloris Leachman won an Oscar with a role that was very different than her extensive comedy work. It's funny to think that film is about 50 years old now and she's still alive and kicking, yet she played the 'older woman' in the film.

[sun surfer]

Voting is complete and the winner is The Hour of the Star! I'll have the discussion thread up soon.

[sun surfer]

The discussion thread is posted!

[sun surfer]

I also read Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead within the last month. It was a strange book but I enjoyed it. Something of a literary animal lover black comedy culturally Polish murder mystery. It without a doubt fit with the Zodiac topic as the protagonist is an amateur horoscope reader and she talks about charts and zodiac signs all through the book including when she is assessing suspects and such, and she often goes off on philosophical tangents related to astrology and the night sky, and the universe and the meaning of life and so on.

It was also interesting because the protagonist is a quirky, eccentric old lady, the type that would be a very minor character in most books but in this book is front and centre as the narrator, which I feel like was a deliberate choice by the author as to why she'd choose this person as her central character to tell the story.