Book Club, Do-Over

Did you know that when the Romans initially built the Coliseum, they found out half-way through the project that most of the "rocks" that their slaves had carried to the site were nothing more than ultra-light adobe style bricks that they had learned to make on the sly, as a way to avoid dying by the thousands dragging around huge chunks of solid marble?

Well, if you DO know that, you should probably hurry to a PhD program in anthropology, write it up, and get it published, because it didn't happen, at least as far as we know to this point. But if it HAD happened, it would have been a very powerful story in support of second chances, generally, and specifically ones related to the book club on here!

Whether it was a lack of excitement over Metamorphosis, or everyone's busy lives, or the fact that the commentzorz button used to ask you for SS# and mother's maiden name in order to post a comment, that's all water under the bridge. For now we have an exciting new book, written by an actual alive person! In this century, no less! And with the anonymous comments feature turned on, you can now snipe away at everyone else who has the temerity to challenge your opinions with the level of haughty condescension that only the Internets can provide!

So order up that book, start reading, and let's all get together and chat about it on May 1, or "May Day" as they call it in all those pagan godless countries like France, or Canada.

Book Club!!!!

OK, so here's how it's going to go down. I'm going to post an initial comment to this post on Kafka's Metamorphosis, our first book club book. Read it online or download it, also free, here.

So if you want to read the book club thread, click on the title of this post, and let the magical exchange of ideas carry you away!

Introducing Spencer's Plain ol' Book Club

OK, it might just be TOO crazy, but what I'm envisioning here is an online book club, sort of like when, in the late 90s, there were e-stores and e-massage parlors and e-everythings. It'll be just like that, except I won't raise and then squander millions of dollars in seed money (unless someone happens to have that lying around, in which case I will gladly accept it and almost certainly squander it).

I thought it would be appropriate, then, for our first book to be available through Project Gutenberg, an online collaborative effort to preserve all of human knowledge, or at least that part of human knowledge that currently exists in book form, in electronic format for people's use all over the internets. So, go here and download the text to Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, which will be our first book! And it's free, so no excuses about not having 75 cents to go down and pick it up from the thousands of used copies available at your local college type used bookstore.

I'll be posting my thoughts on the monthly tome on the last Saturday of every month, and then announcing the next book on the first. So, curl up by the e-fire with our good friend K, and have your comments ready!