Hi everyone! My name is Kate. I am a 31 (going on 32 VERY soon) stay at home Mom to 2 girls, ages 2 and 5. This is my very first book club (thanks Mary!) but I have been a voracious reader for as long as I remember. My tastes in books and authors vary. I have always liked Stephen King, Peter Straub, Robin Cook and Clive Barker. "The Hobbit" was my very first favorite book. I have been reading more non fiction books due to some recent medical situations that have occurred within my family. Paul (my hubby) is also a reader and my 5 year old has been reading for about 6 months now! I can't wait to start reading "Invisible Monsters", which I received yesterday (thank you Amazon!). I am looking forward to meeting the rest of you!

Received the book from Amazon yesterday evening, and slurped up chapter 1 before work this AM.

Wow - and I thought I knew from cynicism. Whew! :-O

I'm reminded of the "I'll show you the life of the mind!" scene from Barton Fink, with the unreality of fire and violence all around.

More tonight, I'm sure.

To post, click on "new entry" after logging in. This will take you to the editing menu which consists of the following fields:

Title = the title of your post.

Primary Category = the category of your post. Currently, the active categories are Club News (for book club-related posts), Invisible Monsters (this month's book-related posts), My News (stuff about you), and Site News (for technical stuff related to the site, like this post). Assigning a category to your post will ensure that it is sent to the appropriate archive page. For example, clicking on "[jun 2002] invisible monsters" at the bottom of the left-hand column will take you to a page of all the posts about Invisible Monsters.

B = bold, i = italics, U = underline, and URL = create a link. Let's say you want to italicize a book title you mention in a post. Simply highlight the text then click on the appropriate button. Movable Type will add the appropriate html tags to the highlighted text.

Main Entry Text = the main body of your post. You'll use this field most often.

Additional Entry Text = extended text for your post. Let's say you're planning to write an entry early in the reading month which contains a lot of spoilers. If you don't want to give the spoilers away, you can write an introduction in the Main Entry Text field and put the spoilers in the Additional Entry Text field. The readers will then have to click on "MORE..." to read the rest of the post. An example appears below.

Exerpt = ignore this field. The Exerpt field is not used in our blog template.

Post Status = whether to publish or save your post as a draft. Your post will only be visible on the main page when you've changed this field to publish. Otherwise, it will be saved as a draft for you to edit later.

Allow Comments and Convert Line Breaks = leave these boxes checked.

Preview = preview your post.

Save = save your post. If you do not press this button when you're finished with your post, it will not be saved.

While navigating in Movable Type, you'll also notice (?) links scattered throughout. Clicking on them will open a new window and take you to the appropriate explanation in the user manual.

Questions?

MORE...

This is an example of where the Additional Entry Text goes.

Hi, my name's Rich, and I love words, wordplay and imagery.

I'm difficult to focus, and thus typically have between six and twelve books "going" at the same time. Once I get my teeth into something I love, though, I'll typically devour it and two removes of its cousins before I realize it's Tuesday and I have to work for a living. :-)

Like Sarah, I can be a bit of a grammar, spelling and usage Nazi, but I have a hunch that she's more attentive to (and experienced with) style and parsimony than I am.

My tastes do run to the escapist, but I've been known to read a worthwhile book on occasion. I'm currently in the middle of the biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Clemens.

Books and authors that have lasted in my memory (and that occur to me here and now): the Illuminatus! trilogy (Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea); The Sparrow; Octavia Butler's whole selection of SF novels; anything by Bruce Sterling (most notably his short story "The Beautiful and the Sublime" and his novel Schismatrix); Gibson's Burning Chrome collection and Neuromancer; Bridget Jones's Diary; almost anything by Anne Rice; and The Lord of the Rings (of course).

I'm shorting most of western literature, of course; but then I am at work. :-D

Thanks, Mary, for doing such a stellar job setting this up.

Hi, I'm Sarah, and I'm a book junkie. I figure we'll all be enabling each others' addictions with this site, and I'm fine with that.

About me: I used to work with Mary out in Chicago. I'm about to be laid off, just like she was. Therefore I may have some serious time on my hands. I'm a journalism person, and therefore have strong ideas about language/editing etc. I will not copy edit your posts, but I will go off on a book that's poorly line-edited. There's no excuse for that. I'm a cat person. I grew up in Wilmington, DE; went to college out in Chicago (ok, Evanston); lived in Hong Kong for three years after college; and have been back in Chicago for about 6 years. Buffy rules. I hate the word "quaint." Thus ends the "getting to know me" portion of the post.

I read just about everything: history, biography, armchair travel, lit fiction, mysteries, scifi, old stuff, new stuff, etc.

A sample of my favorite books/authors:
The Last Apocalypse, a history of the way the world changed at the turn of the last millenium
West with the Night, a memoir of a woman who grew up Africa inthe early 1900s, raised race horses, flew mail planes, and was the first person to fly across the Atlantic from east to west.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, the first serious mind-fuck "I had no idea you could do that with a book" book I ever read.
Just about everything by Robertson Davies, Kage Baker, Connie Willis, Haruki Murikami, Susan Cooper, Madeliene L'Engle, Reginald Hill......

And I can't wait to read what everyone else suggests!

Although we've only just started, I need people to volunteer to moderate in the coming months. The moderator should:

1. Pick the book we’ll read. It should be a title that’s easily found in bookstores or libraries and preferably also out in paperback. I’m a commuting reader and it’s impossible to hold a hardcover while also trying to hold on for your life. Oh, and fiction, please.


2. Post questions for discussion. If the discussion isn’t directed, we might end up with a bunch of posts like "this book sucked" which would make the club suck.


3. Keep the discussion going by posting frequently. Lively activity would make it more interesting for outsiders wandering by as well as keep the club members into it.

Any takers? If I keep on picking the books, my love for nihilistic literature may land all of you on a suicide watch. Besides, I'd also like each of you to expose the other members to books they might not normally choose to read (especially me).

While you're experimenting with Movable Type, you might accidentally post something that you'll want deleted. Although you've checked the "delete" box and hit the "delete" button on the "edit entries page," you'll notice that the post disappears from your entries list but not from the web site. In order to have deleted posts truly disappear from the site, it will have to be rebuilt (republished for you Blogger users). It's something I'll do once a day.

This is mostly a bandwidth issue. I'd like to get a look at how much bandwidth is being used on a monthly basis before giving everyone the ability to rebuild. Since I'm paying for it right now, I'd like to stay within the limits allowed by my current hosting plan. If it turns out we're using a lot of bandwidth (that'd actually be great), I will probably move the book blog over to its own url and hosting plan.

For those of you not familiar with using Movable Type, I'll be posting more information on how to post over the next few days. In the meantime, feel free to use it. You can't break it, so have fun.

Although I haven't finished building all of the pages, I decided to make the site live since I'd like you to have a chance to experiment with posting, play around with Movable Type, and introduce yourselves to each other. As of right now, the following pages haven't been built: individual archives (the page you get when you click the link button at the bottom of each post), the stuff about us category (the test post will disappear as soon as someone posts something else to it), and the monthly archives (the link at the bottom of the right column). They'll be all pretty and looking like the rest of the site over the course of the next few days.

Welcome to book blog! A long weekend, 400 Diet Cokes, and a couple of cartons of cigarettes later, it's arrived. The launch was delayed by unexpected server maintenance on Memorial Day, but at least it's mostly finished. There's still a bit of coding to be done, but I wanted to make it live so everyone could start posting and get their feet wet with Movable Type.

If you've never read anything by Chuck Palahniuk before, be prepared for something wild. I sort of liken Invisible Monsters to riding a loopy rollercoaster. Fast-paced with plenty of twists and turns make it an experience unlike most other conventional novels. You simply need to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Unlike Palahniuk's previous efforts, Fight Club and Survivor, Invisible Monsters does suffer from a few plot problems. Those being, it doesn't have much of a plot. However, I don't want to give all of it away until everyone's had a chance to read it. I'm looking forward to reading and commenting on your posts about one of my favorite authors.