I have a lot (TONS!) of things to do today because I am hosting the family for a Mother's Day BBQ on Sunday. The house is a wreck, flats of flowers need to be planted, a bird's nest in a bad spot in the shed should be relocated, grass must be mowed, and the yard has to be cleared of piles of wood being stored for next winter. There's a chance of rain for this afternoon and tomorrow, so the outside stuff has to be handled ASAP.

While I'm out working my butt off, here are a few bookish things to keep you busy:

• Our discussion of The Wasp Factory is still going. If you've read the book, please feel free to drop in and leave a comment. However, the thread contains huge spoilers. I wouldn't recommend reading through it before having finished the book.
• Interested in starting your own online book club? Check out Curling Up, a new forum site for people who love talking books.
• I Feel Pithy Book Blog is running a book drive to benefit the Oasis Youth Shelter in Ft. Myers, Florida. Find out more about it and, seriously, consider making a donation by purchasing an item from the Amazon wish list. Between now and July 13th, your donation will be matched by the owner of the blog. Get your give on.
• I've been meaning to post about Library Thing's UnSuggester, but Bookninja beat me to it. If you hated The Da Vinci Code or wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole, you might want to read some of these books. However, considering its sales numbers, I bet it's on a lot more bookshelves than the 12,000+ Library Thing members who have admitted to it.
• Speaking of bad writing, poor John Grisham. Looking at the top 20 most available Bookins books, he has the honor of having 10 titles on the list. His books are clearly not keepers.
• According to Stephen Colbert, we are winning the war on reading. "People are going to read what Oprah tells them to read and they are going to like it." Guest Salman Rushdie says he no longer needs to worry about the fatwa and brings Paris Hilton's memoirs to the world's attention.
• Are you a frustrated writer? Maybe a video called "How to Write the Great American Novel" will help. After watching it, I'm now considering becoming a novelist. I regularly have to remind friends/family of my genius and get plenty of sleep, so I must be qualified.
• Plotastic is a blog run by an aspiring novelist who needs some ideas. He's conducting a poll to find out what you think his book should be about. He should watch the above video. If I understood it properly, alliteration and cowboy chaps are more important than plot.
• And don't forget. Our discussion of Tom McCarthy's Remainder will begin on May 21st. Shouldn't you be reading it instead of this?

Our discussion of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory is underway, and I'd like to encourage anyone who has read it to stop by and add a comment. The post will remain sticky at the top of the homepage for easy reference during the rest of this week.

Although BookBlog began as a book club, no membership is required to participate since the focus has moved more toward meaningful discussion. The more voices and points of view we have, the better our understanding will be of each featured title.

The Wasp Factory is a fantastically disturbing book that brings to a head the question of nature versus nurture. Narrator Frank Cauldhame is by his own admission a naughty boy who runs around the isolated island killing bunnies and wreaking havoc. He does boyish stuff like blowing things up and having private wars using any living creature he can find. By all means, he is very masculine in his behavior. He has grandiose ideas of secret powers that he can usually control, but he admits that sometimes these powers are even beyond his command. He has a far-fetched imagination, creating a fantasy world where everything has dark names like his catapult, “the black destroyer,” and areas of the island called “sacrifice poles,” “snake park,” and “bomb circle.” The title of the book comes from the “wasp factory” he created in order to predict the future.

Frank’s family is very strange. His father lives off what is left of the family wealth and is an eccentric ex-hippy. He and Frank seem to have an OK enough relationship, even though Frank knows his father has been spending most of his life telling lies which seem to be for just the heck of it. Frank’s mother abandons him, adding to his hatred of women, which turns ironic as we discover the end of the story. Frank also has a brother, Eric, who escapes from a sanitarium. Eric had been put away for setting dogs on fire and scaring the local children by stuffing worms and maggots into his mouth.

Note: If you have not yet read this book, SPOILERS appear below.

At the end of the book, we find out that Frank is actually female. His father uses an attack by a dog, in which Frank supposedly loses his testicles and most of his penis, as an experiment. Born a girl, Frank’s father pumps her full of steroids and goes as far to create a fake set of male genitalia out of wax. His father obviously has his own issues, but why did he do this?

There are so many strange aspects worth examining in this book. I would first like to discuss Frank’s claim that he has murdered three people. Frank is not a reliable narrator; he has an overly active imagination and a grandiose idea of himself. He claims to have taken his first victim at the age of six. He supposedly killed his cousin with an Adler snake as revenge for the previous year when his cousin killed their bunnies with Eric’s homemade blow torch. Also, Frank claims to have encouraged his younger brother Paul to blow himself up with a bomb found on the beach and to have made an enormous kite allowing his cousin Esmeralda to fly away and never be seen again.

Has Frank really done these things? We do know he has a taste for killing animals, which psychologists often say is a sign of a future serial killer. Could the cause have been the male hormones? Or perhaps Eric does all the killing while Frank tries to take credit for it, and maybe this is the real reason why Eric was sent away. Could the deaths all have been just freakish accidents that occurred when Frank was around? What do you think?

Our discussion of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory will begin on Monday. To get us in the mood and provide a little background, here are a few Banks-related links...

The official site: iainbanks.net

Iain Banks sprang to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984.

Since then he has gained enormous and popular critical acclaim with further works of both fiction and science fiction, all of which are available in either Abacus or Orbit paperbacks.

The Guardian: "The word factory"

The relentlessly inventive mega-selling Scotsman has never feigned to suffer for his art. His latest turnaround time is slightly less staggering when considered in context - since his first, million-selling novel The Wasp Factory was published in 1984, he has settled into a routine of writing for a highly disciplined three months and taking the rest of the year off to pursue his perpetually adolescent interests in fast cars and fancy technology.

The Independent: "Iain Banks: The novel factory"

Banks is the Tarantino of the book world. In 1984 he became an overnight sensation when he published The Wasp Factory, the tale of a bored adolescent who murders three people, then amuses himself by mutilating animals. Short, violent and wilfully perverse, it divided the critics and became a cult classic.

After a five-year wait, The Steep Approach to Garbadale was published last month in the United Kingdom. Following are links to reviews of Banks's lastest novel...

Scotland on Sunday: "The Steep Approach To Garbadale"

So how is the ageing enfant terrible actually doing? On the surface, brilliantly. Whether writing science fiction or literary novels Banks commands sales and reviews that would turn other writers puce with rage, and carries the whole thing off as a kind of joke. But there are also signs that the extraordinary writing trajectory which began with The Wasp Factory (another dysfunctional family with dark secrets) in 1984 is faltering.

Telegraph: "A story of board games and family memories"

The Steep Approach to Garbadale is as good as anything Banks has ever written, if not better. It is the story of a young man's getting of wisdom, an oblique but observant history of Britain from the 1980s to the present day, and a great game of consequences. And he never does let on that 'spraint' is the word for otter dung.

The Australian: "The Steep Approach to Garbadale"

No reader of Iain Banks's first novel, The Wasp Factory, has come away from it unscathed. The story of Frank Cauldhame, disturbed teenage founder of a private religion practised with murderous consequences in an isolated Scottish community, may suggest precursors -- elements of adolescent atavism lifted from William Golding's Lord of the Flies and a pervading atmosphere of sexual disgust that owes something to early Ian McEwan -- but the book's deadpan horror and casual nihilism unfold with a power that is Banks's alone. It remains, almost 25 years after publication, one of the best novels by any postwar Scottish author.

I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.

At the north end of the island, near the tumbled remains of the slip where the handle of the rusty winch still creaks in an easterly wind, I had two Poles on the far face of the last dune. One of the Poles held a rat head with two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice. I was just sticking one of the mouse heads back on when the birds went up into the evening air, kaw-calling and screaming, wheeling over the path through the dunes where it went near their nests. I made sure the head was secure, then clambered to the top of the dune to watch with my binoculars.

—The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Recently, The Guardian conducted a poll asking readers to name the books they can't live without, and The Wasp Factory is number 93. The discussion begins on April 23, 2007, so I hope you'll stop by to share your thoughts.

Three future discussions are currently on our schedule. No membership is required, so I encourage each of you reading this to participate and add your thoughts to the conversation.

March 26, 2007: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is an excellent selection to follow What Is the What. Now that I have read both, I personally feel Achebe's work is the superior novel about a tragic life in Africa. Set in a village in Nigeria and written by a Nigerian author, it has authenticity, a quality I found severely lacking in Eggers's effort. In addition, Things Fall Apart is a top twelve title from the list of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century.

April 23, 2007: Last weekend we had a family dinner, and my sister, Joanne, brought by a couple of books to share. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks was one of them, and she has agreed to moderate a discussion for us. Surprisingly, I barely had to do any begging. If you like Chuck Palahniuk, I bet you'll like Iain Banks.

[Aside: Palahniuk has a new one, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, coming out in May 2007. Please-oh-please, someone send me an advance! BookBlog, PO Box 324, Budd Lake, NJ 07828. I love Chuck!]

May, June, and July 2007: We have open slots for each of these months. I am looking for a title to fill one of them. Anyone interested in leading us for the other two? Anyone?

August 20, 2007: Although August is a way away, Daisy is really, really nice in agreeing to have a second go at discussing Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff. Her work schedule is hectic right now, which is why it's being put off for a while. As soon as I finish my current read, I will gladly pluck this one off the nagging pile that sits next to my desk. I hope you will also chime in when the discussion rolls around.