Brain Pain discussion

Hello Everyone,

By now I’m sure you’ve all heard about Amazon buying GoodReads. Over in the GR Feedback group there has been all kinds of panic, speculation, and gnashing of teeth about what this will mean and how our world is about to come crashing down. Maybe things will change radically, but I can’t imagine Amazon damaging the site to such an extent that we can’t continue our reading and discussions here in the Brain Pain group. Whatever your personal feelings about Amazon, I hope you’ll consider remaining in GoodReads and participating in the Brain Pain group. We’ve got a good thing going on here, so let’s not let Amazon ruin our pleasure.

That being said, I did receive a phone message late Friday afternoon from someone named Jeff Bozos (sp?). He said he wanted to share some “notes” about how we might improve our group’s reading list. He applauded the diversity of our choices, but thought we might want to go more contemporary. For example, instead of ‘Midnight’s Children’, why not read ‘Twilight’? Instead of ‘100 Years of Solitude’, we might try ’50 Shades of Grey’. He applauded our selection of ‘1Q84’, but thought we might want to be more current with ‘11/22/63’. He went on and on with those kind of suggestions. He also told me for each member who I convinced to buy a Kindle, I would receive a $5 gift certificate that I could trade in for kindle ebooks. So, I’m now making it mandatory that all BP members must buy a Kindle and read only ebooks from now on – no exceptions!!!

Okay, so I didn’t get that message, but it could’ve happened…

Alright, back to the real world. We’ve gained many new members since the beginning of the year. To help orient you to our reading and discussions for the year, please take a look at the schedules and descriptions for our various 2013 reading projects:

Magic Realism

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/group_...


Faust thru the Centuries

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/group_...


The Spine 2013

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/group_...


The Vollmann Project

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/group_...

Also, please drop by the ‘Introduce yourself here!’ thread and say hello.


For the Magic Realism project, I was having a hard time choosing which Borges short stories we should read when BP member Bill said, “Why don’t we just read them all?” A good suggestion which makes perfect sense. We will be reading all of the 17 short stories in the ‘Fictions’ collection. A revised schedule can be found here:

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...


Okay, so don’t let the Amazon brouhaha take any time away from your reading. There are a lot of great books that need reading, so let’s get on with it!!

Jim