Book Club
The Anti-Bummer Audio Book Club (A-BABC) is a shameless effort to plug some of the books and authors I can't get enough of so that I'll have somebody to talk about them with other than myself. Below you'll find each season's selection with a few prime quotes and the date/location for the Anti-Bummer Audio Book Club meeting. There is no agenda behind these selections - no alterior motive or deep soul-searching purpose. The A-BABC is not about self help, self betterment, or general enlightenment. It's just one way to read less bad.
CURRENT SELECTION
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- 010 -
ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION
by: Tom Robbins
“Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring.”
“This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.”
PAST SELECTIONS
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- 009 -
KING SOLOMON'S MINES
by: H. Rider Haggard
“It is a hard thing when one has shot sixty-five lions or more, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don't like that."
“Everything has an end, if only you live long enough to see it.”
- 008 -
THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA
by: Yukio Mishima
“Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.”
“The parting, like the white fruit of an apple discolouring instantly around the bite, had begun three days before when they had met aboard the Rakuyo.”
“He wanted to talk about the strange passion that catches hold of a man by the scruff of his neck and transports him to a realm beyond the fear of death.”
- 007 -
THE RIGHT STUFF
by: Tom Wolfe
“He was master of the sky. His was a king's solitude, unique and inviolate, above the dome of the world."
“Definition of a sports car: a hedge against the male menopause.”
“Ohhh, pretty good”
“Straight up into the indigo.”
- 006 -
HOLES
by: Louis Sachar
“It was all because of his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather!”
“Onions!”
“These are the facts: The Walker boat smashed into Sam’s boat. Sam was shot and killed in the water. Katherine Barlow was rescued against her wishes. When they returned to the shore, she saw Mary Lou’s body lying on the ground. The donkey had been shot in the head. That all happened one hundred and ten years ago. Since then, not one drop of rain has fallen on Green Lake. You make the decision: Whom did God punish?”
- 005 -
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST
by: Ken Kesey
“I had to keep on acting deaf if I wanted to hear at all.”
“All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.”
“He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”
“Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.”
“He knew you can't really be strong until you can see a funny side of things.”
- 004 -
THE RUM DIARY
by: Hunter S. Thompson
“Those were the good mornings, when the sun was hot and the air was quick and promising, when the Real Business seemed right on the verge of happening and I felt that if I went just a little faster I might overtake that bright and fleeting thing that was always just ahead.”
“Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception—especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.”
“Sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks...”
“It was a maddening image and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum.”
“There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.”
"I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing."
- 003 -
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, OR, THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE: A DUTY-DANCE WITH DEATH
by: Kurt Vonnegut
“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
"There was a drunk on the other end. Billy could almost smell his breath—mustard gas and roses."
“And so it goes...”
- 002 -
HELLS ANGELS: A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA
by: Hunter S. Thompson
"The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches...like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and non given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know...Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on..."
"the Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The other – the living – are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In."
“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in one pretty and well-preserved piece, but to slide across the finish line broadside, thoroughly used up, worn out, leaking oil, and shouting GERONIMO!!!”
“It had been a bad trip ... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer."
- 001 -
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
by: Ernest Hemingway
“But did thee feel the earth move?”
“I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.”
“I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.”
“I obscenity in the milk of my shame.”
"Less bad."