Brain Pain discussion

Hello Everyone!

The Brain Pain 2015 Reading Schedule is now finalized and posted on the site.

The poll results for Infinite Jest showed 49 “yes” votes and 11 “maybe” votes, which is enough to put the read/reread on the schedule for next year. We’ll begin with a two-week discussion of Hamlet beginning on March 2nd, and begin Infinite Jest on March 16th thru May 24th. That gives us a ten-week discussion period, or about 100 pages per week.

For the Thomas Pynchon poll, Mason & Dixon captured 58% of the votes for the win and Against the Day won 39%. (I’m already inking-in Against the Day for our 2016 schedule) We will begin Mason & Dixon on July 6th.

For our main reading project, aka “The Spine 2015”, we’ll be reading seventeen books beginning with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in January and ending with Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew in December.
Within these seventeen books are two sets of similarly-themed books; one group that could be called “existential angst” and a second that could be called “creativity and the uncanny”. These two groups of books will have a “foundation” book to set the stage for the group. For the “existential angst” group, we will read Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and for the “creativity and the uncanny” group, we will read Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny. These two “foundation” books can provide a kind of theoretical context for comparing the books in the two groups.


There will also be four paired readings scheduled in parallel with the main schedule:

The first pair is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr in January and February.

The second pair is our read/reread of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, preceded by a two-week discussion of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The third pair is a continuation of our reading of William T. Vollmann’s works. We will read his novel, The Rifles, in May, and will read his newest novel, The Dying Grass, in September, if it is released next summer as promised by the publisher.

The last pair is a Halloween-inspired bloodbath in October. First, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, followed by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.


A detailed description of the schedule, along with the Master Schedule organized by start date, can be found here:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...


We have many new members this year, so I’ll just remind everyone that even though we set start and end dates for the discussions, they are not rigid, meaning that you can read at your own pace. The discussions are broken up into week-long segments representing about 100 pages or so of each book. All of the “weekly” discussions are posted on the start date so that if you are a fast reader, you can comment at your own pace. Likewise, if you read slower than 100 pages per week, you can comment as you finish each segment – the discussions are left open indefinitely to accommodate all reading speeds.

Okay, so there you have it. Several of the 2015 books are in the public domain, so if you have an ereader, you can download free copies from Project Gutenberg and similar resource sites.

If you have any questions about the schedule or about Brain Pain in general, please send me a message.

Happy holidays and see you in January!

Jim