Alyoshka

Everyone--

My theory of picking two books was doomed and utterly failed. There was a tie between Wonder Boys and Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. This has left me in a pretty ugly situation because I realize that we need to have this picked as soon as possible.

Instead of allowing the polling to go on any longer or chosing myself. I think the safest thing is to let the winner be whatever book is the cheapest. That is HWoSG. I hope that nobody thinks I'm biased as I did vote for each of these books.

Many will probably nominate Wonder Boys for the June reading, I hope. If anyone sees anything wrong with the way I determined the book to read, please let me know. I want this to be as diplomatic as possible and next time we'll amend this. For now I want everyone to have ample time to purchase the books.

HWoSG was 8.40 while Wonder Boys was 11.20. I'm hoping that the lower price will get more people to participate in the club this month.

With ten votes and a price under ten bucks; Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the May book of the month.

Cost is $8.40 at any of these stores. Pick your favorite store . I'm not sure how shipping compares, anyone know?
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Fatbrain

I followed the dvdtalk links to get these urls...Geoff if they aren't the dvdlink feel free to change them. I'm not sure if it worked right or not!

DVDTALK Linkified

[Edited by gkleinman on 04-28-01 at 01:55 AM]

Alien Redrum

Shipping/handling costs (for Maryland):
Amazon - 4.48
FatBrain - 4.48
Borders - 4.29 + tax
Barnes & Noble - 4.48 + Tax

Here are a couple other options (I hope you don't mind Alyoshka, these are on DVDTalk's link as well and I have nothing else better to do )

Walmart.com - 8.40 + 3.94 s/h (plus tax?)
Half has a couple hardbacks for ~$10.00
Buy.com - 8.35 + 3.25 s/h

Mods, feel free to edit for linkage.

-Steve

BoatDrinks

Alyoshka,
First let me commend you for such hard work and a great job gaffing this whole thing. Well done!

I would perhaps suggest deleting the POLL thread to keep confusion down - and if anyone else votes in the next week or so, we don't have a problem like Florida.

Maybe here you should also post the "time." For instance, are we taking the whole month of May to read? And if so, when is the discussion taking place?

Whether folks like it or not, I think that AHWOSG will turn out to be a great choice.

Thanks again! I'm off to begin reading!

junkie

I knew that $10gc from HP would come in handy. It only cost me $2.88 shipped from Amazon. So when do you start reading the book and all that stuff?

Alyoshka

Could a mod please close the poll thread?

The book is about 500 pages. I think that if we shoot for finishing it in three weeks that's only like 23 pages a day. We'll get a discussion thread going here really soon so people can point out things they notice while reading the book.

Then the last week we can spend more time talking about the book as a whole. Point out different things and all of that. I'm pretty excited!

Thanks for the support so far everyone! I look forward to get started reading this one.

seven

I was going to order from Barnes & Noble and get Beastie Boys DVD and a few other books to bring it to $40 so I could use the code for free shipping. Apparently it's for new customers only so I went to bamm.com where all the books were cheaper anyway.

7 (Who doesn't know why online stores don't realize that if they aren't loyal to their CURRENT customers, then the customers have no reason to be loyal to them.)

Alien Redrum

Absolutely. Great work Alyoshka!

-Steve

RDYoung

Can we discuss stuff while we are reading, or do we have to wait until three weeks or whatever. I'm about 1/3 of the way through already.

just curious.

robyn

BoatDrinks

Yes, Robyn brings up a good point, Aly...

Should we set some guidelines? Like, we will begin discussing on this date? That way, everyone knows how long they have to read the book?

I think talking during is a bad idea since we could run into serious spoiler problems for those who are not as far a long.

Thoughts?

Sn0

If you have a Barnes and Nobel in your area it is on their best seller list so it will also be 8.40 plus local tax wich is still cheaper and you get it now

Alyoshka

Well, I'd like to be able to discuss while reading along with after.

I don't have my copy yet...it just got sent on Saturday. We should go ahead and make a schedule that says like 1st Wednesday you should be X length and we can discuss up to that then Saturday up to X length and you can discuss that far. This way two times a week we'll be able to go further in our discussion and it will keep people on a reading schedule. If they don't make it then they know that looking in the thread will have spoilers.

How does that sound?

battboyy

Having already read this book, I have a few suggestions. Earlier in this topic, someone suggested reading 23 pages a day. I'm not so sure this will work. Most part/chapters are more than 25 pages a piece: part 1 - 45 pages, part 2 - 23 pages, part 3 - 33 pages, part 4 - 18 pages, part 5 - 43 pages, part 6 - 71 pages, part 7 - 40 pages, part 8 - 39 pages, part 9 - 41 pages, part 10 - 53 pages, part 11 - 29 pages (these page counts are all estimated from the table of contents). My recommendation would be to read and discuss the book in parts/chapters. You could probably go 2 days for part 1 (I have a feeling people will be re-reading this portion), 1 day for part 2, etc. I'm not technically participating in this read (though I will probably provide some comments), and I'm not sure what Geoff, Alyoshka (who seems to be running this show) or anyone else will think of this idea, but my suggestion would be to have a seperate topic for each part (AHWOSG part 1 discussion, etc.). I don't think that would take up much more space than one huge post disctussing it. All the topics could even be deleted a month or so after the read takes place. I think this would be best, because it would sort of level the playing field for those who may read a little slower or just don't have enough time to read. Still, there should be some sort of schedule for when each topic can be opened, or else there will be complete anarchy (you can use my page counts as a guide; they're within a page of the actual page counts). People who are ahead can re-read portions (I know I will be doing so while this read goes on). Finally, even though Eggers tells you to, don't pass over the Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book, Preface to This Edition, Acknowledgements or Incomplete Guide to Symbols and Metaphors (somewhere around 40 pages in all, but can easily be read in a day). I personally enjoyed these parts a lot, and they will give you some sort of indication of what to expect from the rest of the book. And finally (for real this time), don't overlook the Copyright Information page. Sorry to waste your time.

Scarecrow

Thanks for the tip. That's what I went ahead and did on this one. Hopefully next time we'll have a decision sooner and I'll order it through a DVD Talk link. The last time I ordered a book from Amazon they sent it UPS and it took 7 days (counting the weekend) to get here. I didn't want to wait that long.

RandyM

I ordered mine from Amazon Friday (I jumped the gun a little since I was planning on reading this book anyway.) It got shipped Friday USPS Priority (comp upgrade.) I also ordered one other paperback. Maybe with all our ordering the same thing, we can figure out Amazon's shipping policy here, like when they decide to ship book rate (media mail.)

Added: Received it this morning (Monday.) 3 days including a Sunday. Not bad.

[Edited by RandyM on 04-30-01 at 02:19 PM]

junkie

I ordered my book on Saturday w/Amazon. I just tracked it and it will not be here until May 7th, WTF! That seems like a long time. Does everyone else have the book?

RDYoung

I have mine, but purchased it at my local B&N for $10. Had a GC to burn.

robyn

BoatDrinks

Alyoshka,
battboyy brought up some good points.

I think a version of what you suggested is good.

Alyoshka

I think he did too. I just got my book today from Amazon.com shipped Saturday. Good time. I'm going to start a thread on the book reading schedule to make it clear to everyone from battboy's reccomendation. Looking over the book it seems right on!