Greetings!

Is anyone interested in a Feb book? Please list your suggestions. Looking forward to everyone's thoughts.

I am stumped. I beg for nothing British. Please, I want to get away from 18th, 19th, and even 20th century England. No more tea time with the elite.

How 'bout a nice American classic?

A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms

The Jungle

The Invisible Man

An American Tragedy

O Pioneers

Or maybe some classic pulp, Tarzan of the Apes.

Nine Stories.  Salinger.

I like the idea of something by Salinger.  RIP. 

Nine Stories sounds good to me.

Caviglia,

Does Nine Stories feature the Glass family that you mentioned enjoying in another thread on CMT? I always like to read books that profoundly affect readers.

I'll vote for it. It'd be a nice intro to an unfamiliar author who just passed. 

Yes!  It's really, really fantastic.  Far better than Cather in the Rye IMO.

Nine Stories contains:

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish"

Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut"

"Just Before the War With the Eskimos"

"The Laughing Man"

"Down at the Dinghy"

"For Esme...With Love and Squalor"  <--------------------This title makes me laugh.

"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes"

"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period"

"Teddy"

I've been slowly reading  all of the books in the children's series A Series of Unfortunate Events.  The villian, Count Olaf, has a girlfriend named  Esme Squalor. I adored that name. I used to use it as a screen name on another board but I had no idea where it came from until today. LOL.

I have recently picked up the Unfortunate Event books where I left off at book 8, The Hostile Hospital. All the patients have names from literature. It's fun to try to figure out where these names came from. Emma Bovary, Clarissa Dalloway, Mikhail Bulgakov, Haruki Murakami, Charley Anderson (?), Jonah Mapple (?)  were patients.

Funny thing is if I hadn't been reading so much I would still have no clue

Funny,

I had Nine Stories on my reminder list. There were 5 copies in the system. Now there are zero. I hope my request is accepted. Otherwise I'll be purchasing a copy.

I read Nine Stories in high school, miles better than Catcher in the Rye.  My favorites are "The Laughing Man" & "A Perfect Day for Bananafish".

Tome Trader:  A-ha!   You ain't read John Dos Passos' trilogy, U.S.A., have you?  Or else you read it, but don't remember the names of the characters?   Charley Anderson is the mechanic-aviator-inventor character in The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money.

But it beats me who Jonah Mapple was . . . .

But it beats me who Jonah Mapple was . .

Moby Dick, maybe? There is a chapter called the Sermon in which Father Mapple gives a sermon about Jonah in the whale.

Here's a quote from the Snicket book:

"They visited Room 201 and sang to Jonah Mapple, who was suffering from seasickness"

More patients:

Bernard Rieux turned out to be a man with a nasty, hacking cough that shook his  body so much he could scarecely hold his balloon"

"The next patient on the list was Cynthia Vane, a young woman with a terrible toothache"

Sorry for the hijack.

Since it's so short <200 pages, maybe we can do Franny & Zooey, too - maybe as a bonus, if people would wish.

I'd be happy to lead.  When would be a good time to start? 

One of my libraries has Nine Stories and I have Franny and Zooey, so I'm in for Feb.

I've ordered it and the person sending it used DC and it's already in the Chicago area. A clear sign I should participate.

I've ordered it three days ago and the PBS member is failing to respond. A clear sign I am probably screwed.

To clarify the book is Nine Stories by Salinger and Franny and Zooey is the bonus. Caviglia is going to lead the discussion around Feb. 18-22. Does this sound right?

Yes, it sounds right.

Yes - I was thinking I'd divide the discussion into two or three threads over the course of those days.  How are people doing at this point with book availability?

I have Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey on the way.