The Lit Net Monthly News

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[FONT="Book Antiqua"] [B]August 2009 [/B][/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/I] Welcome to the August edition of The Literature Networks online newspaper. Every month, we will keep you updated with information regarding threads, contests, Book Club and lots more!
Happy Reading.

[B][I][CENTER][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"]Forum Book Club[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/I][/B]
The Book Clubs Summer Challenge this year is As for Me and My House by Sinclair Ross
[url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44642[/url]
The Book Club is now reading the August Gothic Read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Poe [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46027[/url]
We are also now voting for the September Comic Novel.
[url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45441[/url]
It is currently Nomination period for the October Horror Read [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46028[/url]
The Forum Shakespeare Discussion Group is currently starting on Henry IV Part I. Pop over to the sub forum is you are interested in participating in the Discussion or any other forum Discussions. [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=5895[/url]

The Forum Book Club is always happy to have new participants. If you are interested, you can find it in the Reading section of the Forum Index page.

[B][I][CENTER][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"]Official Forum Contest[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/I][/B]
The August Elimination round is now under way. Please read and vote for the story you liked the best. [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?p=763348#post763348[/url]
The winner shall be announced in the September Edition.

[B][I][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"][CENTER]Unofficial Poetry Contests[/CENTER][/FONT][/SIZE][/I][/B]

The Personal Poetry forum is one of Litnets’ most active forums and comes complete with a sub-forum dedicated to poetry games and contests. We have three very popular poetry contests located in the sub-forum; The Picture [URL="http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23675&page=42"]Poetry Contest (continued…) [/URL] , [URL="http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23444&page=34"]The Form Poetry Contest [/URL] and [URL="http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38056&page=4"]The Subject Poetry Contest[/URL]. Why not pop in and give it a go. You might just win!
The current winners are;
Form: Dark Muse
Picture: Adorero Dio
Subject: no announcement yet
Congratulations to you all!

[B][I][CENTER][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"]Featured Personal Poetry[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/I][/B]
This month we have selected three poems from The Personal Poetry Forum, posted during the month of July, to feature in the Litnet Monthly News! I hope you like them too!

[B][U]MORPHEUS #2[/U][/B]

I’m trying to sleep, but Morpheus has packed his bags and fled,
and when you’re not really sleepy, it’s very hard to sleep.
I toss and turn and writhe upon my bed.

I don’t think these are sugar-plums dancing in my head!
I fall through a night that’s endless, dark, and deep.
I’m trying to sleep, but Morpheus has packed his bags and fled.

Oh, well. No matter what I order, he brings something else instead,
rifling my dreams in search of something to make me weep.
I toss and turn and writhe upon my bed,

as Morpheus’ third-rate assistant messes with my head.
Like Sisyphus, I roll my weariness up an incline smooth and steep,
trying hard to sleep. But Morpheus has packed his bags and fled.

Nightmares ride by, a ghostly cavalry dread,
conjured by the daemon assistant at my feet.
I toss and turn and writhe upon my bed.

“Say, old boy, if you can’t do dreams any better, I’d rather be dead!”
“It can be arranged, if that is really what you seek.”
“I’m trying to sleep, but—“ “Morpheus has packed his bags and fled.”
“Yeah. So I toss and turn and writhe upon my bed.”

Pendragon
© 7/2/97

[B][U]Bubbles Floating on Concrete[/U][/B]

The congested corridors have spider eyes
And paintings seem to sing
A lullaby
To babies in oblivion’s nursery
In the waxing and waning of stuffed toys
Grown to giant size
And the Blue Bubble Jelly Marine
In Fuchsia coral reefs
Where the salmon swim cross-stream
To criticizing tongues of iris
Gracefully floating, its mushroom head just bobs
And tendrils sting
Did I drift away and forget you were there?
Omnipresent problems perpetually oppress
And I slammed my fingers in a snide car door
And can’t seem to care

By MorpheusSandman

[B][I][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"][CENTER]Forum Advertisement[/CENTER][/FONT][/SIZE][/I][/B]
Do you want to let off that steam and vent your anger? Then why not visit [URL="http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25259&page=27"]Get it off your Chest![/URL]
Or if you are looking for advice, but want to remain unknown then why not contact Scheherazade and have your problem posted in [URL="http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36313&page=5&highlight=personal+anonymous"]Personal and Anonymous[/URL]. Your fellow Litnetters will pass on their own words of wisdom.

[B][I][CENTER][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"]Featured Members Profile[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/I][/B]

Each month we will be sifting through Litnets member profile pages and selecting one as our Featured Profile of the Month. So get personalizing, decorating and designing your profile.
This months profile of the month is [B]Lynne50 [/B]for her leafy page. [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/member.php?u=58001[/url]

[B][I][CENTER][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"]Blog of the Month[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/I][/B]

Each month we will be selecting a blog and awarding it the title of Blog of the Month right here in Lit Net Monthly News.
This months Blog of the Month is [B]Jersea’s[/B] blog. [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?u=60223[/url]

[B][I][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"][CENTER]Featured Threads of the Month[/CENTER][/FONT][/SIZE][/I][/B]

Every month we will feature different threads and games. This months Thread of the Month and Game of the Month are:
Thread of the Month is What Makes Good Writing? [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46058&page=7[/url]
Game of the Month is Lymerick [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2549&page=7[/url]


[B][I][CENTER][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"]Lit Net Book Reviews[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/I][/B]
This month’s book review was randomly selected from the Write a book Review sub-forum in general Literature.

[B][U]A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby[/U][/B]

Nick Hornby has a new book coming out next month (September, 2009) so I finally decided to get around to reading his last one, A Long Way Down. You know, so I could get all warmed up and stuff for the new one.

Loved it.

It goes like this: On the rooftop of Toppers’ House in North London on New Year’s Eve, a group of four previously unacquainted people have a chance meeting, and they decide to form a gang. They are all of different temperament, background, domestic situation, character, and age: Martin is 40ish and a former TV morning-show host (Former because he has recently been released from prison for having sex with a fifteen-year-old). Maureen is 50ish and a single, stay-at-home mom who is caring for her severely disabled twenty-year-old son. JJ is 30ish and an ex-pat American working as a pizza delivery man after the breakup of his rock-n-roll band and the departure of his girlfriend. Jess is a London teen with – issues. Oh yes, I forgot to mention, they were all on the rooftop that night for the same reason: to commit suicide.

As with his first novel, High Fidelity, Hornby’s story telling method is in the first person, told directly and intimately to the reader. In High Fidelity the neurotic protagonist, Rob, tells the story from start to finish, but in A Long Way Down each of the four main characters take turns guiding the reader through the story. It’s an interesting technique and it allows the author to use the strengths of the first person narrative and extend those strengths to four unique points of view. I’m sure professors of interpretive literature have a name for this style, but I don’t know what it is. Anyway, in my opinion, it is the method that provides for Hornby’s superb character development in this novel.

Here’s an example of Hornby’s first person narrative told intimately to the reader. I should set it up first. On the Toppers’ house that night the four of them decide to give their suicide decision some extra time just to see if they are really serious. During that time they plan to get together and check-up on each other. One of the things they decide to do in the interim is to read the work of writers who have killed themselves. I chose this vignette because, well, this is a literature forum. Here’s Jess:

[QUOTE]We started with Virginia Woolf, and I only read like two pages of this book about a lighthouse, but I read enough to know why she killed herself: She killed herself because she couldn’t make herself understood. You only have to read one sentence to see that. I sort of indentify with her a bit, because I suffer from that sometimes, but her mistake was to go public with it. I mean, it was lucky in a way, because she left a sort of souvenir behind so that people like us could learn from her difficulties and that, but it was bad luck for her. And she had some bad luck, too, if you think about it, because in the olden days anyone could get a book published because there wasn’t so much competition. So you could march into a publisher’s office and go, you know, I want this published, and they’d go, Oh, OK, then. Whereas now they’d go, No, dear, go away, no one will understand you. Try Pilates or salsa dancing instead. [/QUOTE]
There’s a natural ease and flow to the writer’s prose and it was a pleasure to read. Even so, he managed to get at some pretty hefty philosophical questions in the novel, questions of life and meaning, and he did it by way of a comic novel rather than a bludgeoning philosophical tract.

Here I go with an opinion again but I thought his two stronger characters were Jess and Martin. They seemed to me to be spot-on. Maureen was a little flatter and yet he examined closely the relationship (or her imagined relationship) between her and her son. JJ missed a little. I suppose I could hear Hornby’s British come through JJ’s American from time to time, just a subtle slip-up in slang or a minor difference in syntax. It’s the same sort of thing I hear when a Hollywood actor attempts a southern accent. Close, but no cigar, mon frère.

Speaking of Hollywood, I understand that Johnny Depp bought the movie rights to this novel but I don’t think any work has been done yet. High Fidelity was made into a pretty good movie, although I thought John Cusack played Rob a little too serious. That said, I thought Hugh Grant nailed Will in About a Boy. (I mean, Hugh Grant didn’t literally nail Will, he just interpreted the part well.)

So, there you go. I went down to my local book-monger yesterday and put my name on the list for Nick Hornby’s new novel: Juliet, Naked. It’s due to be released in the US on September, 29. I’ll make it a birthday present from me - to me.

Sancho

[B][I][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"][CENTER]Forum Advertisement[/CENTER][/FONT][/SIZE][/I][/B]
Wondering what Litnets top 100 books are? Why not pop on over to Dark Muses Lit Nets Top 100 Books Official List and see for yourself! [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=40711&page=7[/url]

[B][I][CENTER][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"]August Birthdays[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/I][/B]

Here are this months Litnet birthdays! Also, don’t forget that many of these members will be sent an interview, so look out for the [URL="http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36273&page=4"]Getting to Know You thread[/URL].

Happy Birthday!
Papayahed, Bookworm03, Biggus, Quark, Lord of Lorien, Chava, Madhuri, JBI, Cranberry, Annamariah, Mono, bree, farnoosh, Adorero Dio, Pretty^Athens, lupe, SleepyWitch, limajean, EAP, Lostprincess13, SpurYourImagina, promtbr.

This month also sees the birthday of CdnReader, who sadly passed away in February. Let us especially remember her this month on her birthday.

[B][I][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"][CENTER]New Additions to the Site[/CENTER][/FONT][/SIZE][/I][/B]
There are some new quizzes added to the forum by Logos. If you have some free time on your hands, why not give them ago! [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/quiz.php?catid=1[/url]
There have been some recent upgrades to the forum. If you are interested in seeing what Admin has now created and changed, please follow the link below. [url]http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45417[/url]

[B][I][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"][CENTER]Letters to the Editor[/CENTER][/FONT][/SIZE][/I][/B]

Maybe you can highlinght some of the great blogs that have been posted lately. There was one in particular about the gas crises that I thought was well written. :p – Virgil

Summer Reading
Dear newsletter,

I have not been posting so much recently to our beloved Literature Network forums due to my slavish devotion to boat and water, paddle and fishin' pole -- in these summer months the call of the water is like that of the sirens to Odysseus' sailors to me. (And I am happy to report the my efforts in angling were not unfruitful. Nay! My haul of tiny sunfishes and minuscule perches has been particularly ripe with abundance this year).

But to matters more closely concerning those here -- I would like to promote the practice of taking a favourite book, particularly one that has been read over and over again, that is dog-eared, coffee stained, watermarked, and annotated, to a nearby stream, river, pond, lake, ocean, bay, sound, rivulet, rill, storm drain, rain-filled gutter, or any other convenient form of water and read. Read. Read.

The sound of moving water mixed with the flow of artful language fits the inner tune of the human mind and soul like no other harmony known to me.

Of course, should you take up my humble reading advice, be it for an hour, an afternoon, or even day stolen from work, I also recommend that you take along a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, a dozen worms, fishing pole & hook and bobber. And, if you're not above the practice, a pack of the cheapest cigars at your local convince mart.

The Comedian

Dear Litnetter
I would like to say best of luck to two of Litnets regulars this month. Firstly, Pussnboots (and hubby) with their adoption process. Almost there!!
And Secondly, our very own Andave Ya is heading off to start college life.
Best of luck to you both!
La Gra
Niamh

[B][I][SIZE="4"][FONT="Book Antiqua"][CENTER]Special Thanks[/CENTER][/FONT][/SIZE][/I][/B]

I would like to thank everyone who helped contribute to the Newsletter, whether they were aware they were contributing or not!
Also a special thank you to all those that subscribe to the newsletter.
Yours truly
The Litnetter