A Hero Of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov - 2006 - paperback - 182 pages - $17.99 at fishpond.com.au

Lermontov’s “A Hero Of Our Time” was published when the author was just 25 in 1839 and was the only book the young man ever put into print. The book describes as the author writes in his preface, “a portrait built up of all our generation’s vices in full bloom”.

The eponymous hero is one cast very much in the Byronic tradition, being a deeply brooding, melancholic, womaniser given equally to arrogance, nihilistic despond and hedonism.

The book explores themes familiar to modern audiences, namely that dangerous freedom is vastly preferable to protected servitude.

Enticingly for those of you with impatient tastes, the book is comprised of 5 short novellas so concentration spans need not be overly taxed.

A Hero Of Our Time has been lauded as the first novel in Russian to truly place such a complex and contradictory character under rigorous psychological scrutiny. Lermontov is often credited as a primary influence on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and other great 19th-century writers.

Lermontov himself was born into a wealthy Muscovite family, never really stood out during his education, but started to gain some notoriety when he began to pass around wildly pornographic poetry while he was in the military.

His life was ended with rather sudden tragedy when he was bested in a cliff-top dual by a chap who’d taken umbrage at one of Lermontov’s ribald jokes. He was just 26.

Additional Resources:

There’s a full Hero Of Our Time study guide available if you’ve read the book and are keen for more, or to appear really smart at the discussion.

There is also a free copy of the book you can read online if you’ve the eyes for it, or the ink for printing.

If you’re feeling especially heroic yourself you might be interested to read the entire text of A Hero Of Our Time in it’s original Russian – I dare you spot the nuanced differences from the English version and really show off at parties.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Picked as a rank outsider dark-horse not least because it had nothing to do with our stated aims of either classics or science fiction, the next book you will be reading is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

According to our good friends at wikipedia, Markus Zusak is the son of an Austrian father (who was a house painter) and a German mother. The Book Thief is his fifth work of fiction.

In an interview for the Sydney Morning Herald, Zusak said that when he was growing up he heard stories about Nazi Germany, the bombing of Munich, and Jews being marched through the small German town his mother lived in. These stories inspired him to write The Book Thief.

Apparently he was inspired to write after reading such works at Hemingway’s The Old Man & The Sea, which is more than can be said for you guys [as far as I know].

Although the American publisher of The Book Thief has marketed the nearly 600-page book set in Nazi Germany as a young-adult novel, it was originally intended and published in Zusak’s native Australia specifically for adults.

The author currently lives in right here in Sydney, with his wife and daughter. He enjoys surfing and watching movies in his spare time – so he must be alright.

It is timely that we read the book now as a full length feature film of The Book Thief is set for release at some point in 2010 – so now we can all go see it and smugly announce afterward that the book was of course much better.

To whet your appetites for what, given its length, is not an insubstantial book, semiliterati has kindly sourced some background materials for your perusal.

Below is a 29 minute video of the mild-mannered Markus Zusak speaking about The Book Thief at the salubrious Southerland Library in 2007. In the video he talks about the vital importance of small detail in engendering belief in fiction, and the critical role of failure in forming a finely written book. It also serves as a slightly scary reminder of just how big a 550 page book can look.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you feel like adopting someone else’s well-read views as your own there is a fairly comprehensive review of the Book Thief by Elizabeth Chang of The Washington Post that is still available to read on Amazon.com.

There is a written interview with Markus Zusak on the corner of the Random House website that they have kindly kept aside for our man, though you may want to brace yourself as the site is not easy on the eyes. The site also contains a couple of extracts from the book so you’ve something to read while you’re waiting for your fishpond.com.au order to arrive.

Some purchasing options if you don’t feel like popping down your local bookshop:

Fishpond :

Hardcover, 24hr shipping: $30.97
Paperback, 8-12 days shipping: $17.05
Audio CD, 6-12 days shipping: $44.29

BetterWorld Books:

Paperback, 10-12 shipping, US$10.98

Amazon Books:

Paperback, 18-32 days shipping: US$9.40

Dymocks Books:

Paperback, 1-6 weeks shipping: $23.95

Booktopia (check the ads on the right – there’s usually a link)

Paperback, 3-5 days shipping : $17.49

The Book Thief Reading Notes:

Some themes to look out for and consider as you make your way through the book:

1. The effect of using Death as a narrator
2. The significance & use of colour
3. Literature & the power of words – in the world of this book
4. Guilt
5. Friendship
6. Man versus Society
7. The Beauty and Brutality of Humanity

I’ll be posting more such ponderances in the comments here as I make my way through the book and around the web.

Get your reading glasses on gentlemen!

Gentlemen of Book Club,

Good to see you all in such fine form at the last meeting of the Book Club – even if book readership was disappointingly low.

Buy "A Voyage for Madmen" by Peter Nichols from fishpond.com.au

The next book you will either ignore or read carefully is A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, suggested at the very last minute by The Coo.

“In this extraordinary book, Peter Nichols chronicles a contest of the individual against the sea, waged at a time before cell phones, satellite dishes, and electronic positioning systems. A Voyage for Madmen is a tale of sailors driven by their own dreams and demons, of horrific storms in the Southern Ocean, and of those riveting moments when a split-second decision means the difference between life and death.”

If by any chance you’ve got yourself a Kindle thingie you can download Voyage for Madmen from Amazon. That link also gives you the chance to read the first few pages of the book – not that you can back out of reading it now of course.

Otherwise, you can support your neck of the woods and click that nice big image and get your copy of the book from an antipodean company called Fishpond.

The plan is still to meet  on Tuesday 7th April (rather than March as per NC’s email).

Be there or feel the sting of our vague despond!

For those of you who may still need a bit more convincing, you might like to read an interview with the book’s author Peter Nichols.

Some questions to think about as you read A Voyage for Madmen & Non-Fiction in General:

Seeing as how this is the first bit of non-fiction (at least since I came on board), and that non-fiction throws up some very different sorts of questions to that of its more creative cousin,  I thought I’d give you all some points to be thinking about while you read the book – or perhaps to think about now that you’ve finished the book, depending on your level of commitment, enthusiasm etc.

1. Can fact or history based non-fiction have the same inspiring effect as fiction? If yes with Peter Nichols, then how?
2. Are you aware of forming favorite characters as you read through the book? Who did you want to win and why?
3. Did you care who won at all?
4. Did you feel Peter Nichols had a favorite? Who?
5. Would this book be of interest to people who care not one jot for sailing? Why or why not?
6. Could you tempt your wife/girlfriend to read this book?
7. Are these tails of heroic survival all the more impressive because they are based on historical facts?
8. Does reading this book make you want to sail? Sail more often? Never sail again?
9. If you do sail, is it pleasing to reflect on how far sailing has developed in the last 40 years?
10. How does reading Voyage for Madmen make you feel about your own life? Inspired? Sadly pathetic?
11. Are you interested enough in any of the characters in this book to go read their own accounts of what happened?
12. Do you learn much of anything about men, the late 60′s, sailing, yourself, determination, stoicism etc while reading the book? If so what?
13. Is this book a celebration or a criticism of the mariners whose lives we follow in A Voyage for Madmen?
14. Are you finding the way in which the book is written keeps you interested? Would you regard it as a Page-Turner?
15. What does Peter Nichols do to control the pace of the book?
16. If you didn’t know much about sailing or yachts, was there enough explanation of the jargon that was used? Do you know your Sloop from your trim-tab?
17. Did you learn anything important from reading the book?
18. Did you have a favorite passage, phrase, or moment from Voyage for Madmen?