Happy Thanksgiving to all of you celebrating it today! Here’s hoping you share the day with family and friends, stuff yourselves silly, then fall asleep on the couch under a good book.

Tripp:

Rest assured, my friend, no mess shall be given thee on our northward weekday treks. But I fear I may not live up to your rambunctious introduction. Though you're right about Anna. (And yes, that's husbandly bias. What of it?)

Looking forward to all the cool books to come my way!

He beat me to the punch. I know cliff through a mutual friend in seminary land. He is a good guy and will be able to bring a lot to the greater conversation. Also know that Cliff's wife, Anna, is a librarian par excelence and is known to write reviews and all that mess. She,too, is a great resource. I wonder what books may be thrown our way.

So, let's all welcome Cliff. That way he does not give me a bunch of mess when we carpool up to Northwestern!

Today is a calling in sick at work day. I saw Mary's email in my inbox, and decided I'd go ahead and post.

I'm looking forward to some good books and some good discussion. (Thanks, Tripp and Mary.) I won't be taking on Don Quixote right now, but like the looks of some of the ones on deck.

My name is Clifton. I'm a grad student in philosophy at Loyola University here in Chicago. And I promise not to use any of my ten dollar philosophy jargon--just so long as none of you use your twenty dollar lit crit jargon!

I'm married to Anna. We have two house cats: an orange tabby named Prozac, and a calico named Pandora. Both sisters from the same litter. We also have two ferrets: a silver named Cate, and a sable named Jake.

Whew. That took it out of me. Now to rest and recuperate.

Books Rule!

According to the Quixotometer (thanks to Kathy for the ingenious name), I’m winning. I seriously doubt that’s the case, since I’ve only been reading about 12 pages a day. Don’t forget to update your standing by either commenting here or sending an e-mail to mistress[at]bookblog[dot]net.

Also, please log in and update your author profile to fill in the boxes for "Email Address" and "Website URL (if any)."

Thanks to falling asleep before 10:00 p.m. the last two nights, I woke up abnormally early and frighteningly energetic this morning. I decided to be industrious and used the wee hours to add some enhancements to the site.

Author Profiles: Your author name at the bottom of each of your posts will now either link to your personal web site, e-mail address, or nothing. I’ve primarily done this because I’d like to eventually get rid of the hard-coded e-mail links to the right as a means of keeping spambots from culling our e-mail addresses. In order for it to work, everyone needs to log into MT and edit your profiles to fill in the boxes for "Email Address" and "Website URL (optional)." If you have no personal web site, leave that box blank. When I dump the links on the right, your e-mail address will only be stored inside MT and won’t be readable from our html source by spambots.

Search Box: I’ve added a search box to the bottom of the left sidebar. It’s not its permanent home or the final version of how it will work, since I quickly slapped it up so you can have fun looking around (if that’s something you like to do to have fun).

Extended Entry: Extended text will now expand and collapse right on the main page rather than take you to the individual thread. Thanks to scriptygoddess for providing the code.

The Don Quixote Progress-o-Meter: As promised in my last group e-mail, the link at the top of this column will give you a popup box showing our progress on Don Quixote (thanks to Mike95 for the applet). At 32 pages, Kara is in the lead. If you’d like to add yourself to the bar graph or update your page count, send an e-mail to mistress[at]bookblog[dot]net.

No, I still have not created a FAQ. Get off my back.

This may be more complicated than I originally thought. Don Q has been published and re-published in many different editions and with many different translators, and there are differences between said editions/translators. To make things easier (?) here's what I'm going from:

Penguin Classics edition, translated by J.M. Cohen, translation first published 1950. It weighs in at 940 pages. I believe this is the edition that Mary linked to at left.

No, I have not started. However, I read fast and am un/underemployed, so I'm not too worried about you.

Yes, I'm starting today -- tomorrow at the latest. OK, maybe Tuesday, after my current project is done.

Another issue raised: Andy says that there is some dispute over whether book 2 really counts as Don Quioxte. I'm planning on reading it anyway, but if you don't get through it, you can use the legitimacy questions as your excuse.

There will be NO extra points given for quoting from "Man of La Mancha." You may, however, get extra points for referring to "Lost in La Mancha," the recent documentary about Terry Gilliam's quixotic quest to make a movie version of Don Quixote.

You also get extra points for telling me how "quixotic" should be pronounced. I've never really had to say it, but in my head. I've always pronouced it as if it were an English word -- i.e., "quicks-otic." I'm pretty sure that's wrong. But then again, does anyone ever say it out loud?

Please join me in welcoming Geno to the club!

Besides performing in an improvisational hip hop band, Blue Sky Research, he is also a journalist, an editor, and a writer of short stories and poetry. I found two of his articles online and here they are for your perusal: Indie, Acts Have Stories to Tell and The Radio Shack. He’ll be in good company here since we already have a few journalists and writers among our membership. I’m sure we’re all looking forward to Geno joining the fray and adding his perspective on Don Quixote to our next discussion.

Of course, I instantly knew I wanted him in the club when he mentioned Fight Club as being the book which turned him on to contemporary writers. Any fan of Palahniuk is okay by me.

Sorry for neglecting this poor little site so much lately. Usually, I like to come in right at the end of a discussion and sweep up, but too many things have been on my mind over the past couple of weeks.

First of all, thanks to Tripp for moderating this month’s selection. I’m sure everyone can agree that it was a good experience to read a not-so-mainstream work of literature. After all, that’s the point of being part of this club: to expose yourself to books you might not normally choose and weigh in on them with people of varying viewpoints.

Personally, I enjoyed the single post discussion thread we had for Descent Into Hell rather than the one question per day format of previous discussions. There was some good give and take going on and the thread had more of a conversational feel to it without breaking the flow to move on to the next question. Of course, each moderator is in the driver’s seat for the month, so it’s up to you to handle the discussion using whatever format you feel is most effective for dissecting your selection.

Besides our current behemoth, Don Quixote, we’ve only got one other upcoming book listed on our sidebar to the left. Andy still needs to choose the title for February and we need a moderator for March. Any volunteers?

For our members, I’ve added a new category for book reviews. If you’ve read an interesting title and would like to share it with the group, please log in and post a review. Besides helping to expand our literature repertoire, it might be a good way to get some activity going during non-discussion time.

Gotta run. My copy of Don Quixote contains exactly 940 pages and I want to finish my current read, The Return of the King, before I get at it. Happy reading!