I can't find this anywhere, I'll have to download.
Have we planned a start date yet?

Next sunday.

Word to the first statement. My copy is 696 pages.

lol

I'm in for this, I have a little money to spend on books this holiday and almost no direction to go towards. However, I would like to participate in discussion of meaningful works -- I'm not going to buy some watery pulp novel or immerse myself into political bullshit. I'll see if I can pick this up...

I don't even care about getting all those luxuries, I just want a strong retirement fund when I get older. That's why I think high school teachers have a pretty good lifestyle. You make 30k when you first start out and when you retire after 20 years your pension is 80% of the salary of your final year. Plus you only work half of the year.

It's not even that. I just want to have enough money to live in a neighborhood where I don't need to lock my doors at all hours. Or enough money to go and grab some food with my friends whenever I want to. If I'm making car payments, house payments, and paying off student loans 30k isn't going to cut it.

They only get paid for half of the year though.

yeah but you have to deal with high school kids all fucking day.

Not true, teachers are paid all year, even during summer break. The pay is a bit less during the time off, but they still get paid. My dad's a teacher, I know this from personal experience. The pay isn't exactly high, but it's enough to support a family and still have a decent enough retirement.

My mother's a teacher and I have talked with her about the exact mechanics of it. The school system pays you for the 180 or so days that you work. Teachers are just offered the option to spread that pay out over the year equally or do it how your dad does it... It may very state to state though. I'm not sure.

Didn't see this, I don't know. I'm not too big into reading commercial fiction anymore. I guess you could call that pretentious but you can only read Stephen King writes about a self-loathing writer and Chuck Palahniuk tries to make you puke so many times and honestly how much discussion can you have it on? I love Hunter S. Thompson for instance but if we read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas what's there to say? It's a pretty straight-forward novel; beautiful in it's nihilism but ultimately very easy. This isn't to say I would be opposed to reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (a similar book in a post-beat hippie sense) or even On the Road I'd just prefer if mixed it up with Sartre or Machiavelli more often than not.

In general I'd if we read books that were challenging, both intellectually and grammatically (not so much this, but not everything should be Hemingway. Some of his sentences are the most satisfyingly simplistic ever written but at the same time you need a healthy mix.) The idea behind this being that if you have to work out sentences and contemplate and evaluate ideas presented then the reward at the end of the book will be greater because you had to exercise your mind and hopefully, expand it as well.

I'm not suggesting we read Dan Brown, but I think perhaps that the project would be more popular if you compromised that attitude a little. Generally I feel rewarded after finishing a book because it entertained me, not because it taxed my mental acumen.