Mod post: theme suggestions

[damned_colonial]

Please suggest themes you'd like to see covered here! Cut and paste the following into a comment:

ETA: please put your theme in the subject of your comment!

Theme:
Are you prepared to run it? Yes/No
Suggested books, if you have them already:


What does it mean to run the theme?

1. At least one month in advance, you'll let everyone know about the theme and your suggested reading for it. You need to suggest at least 3 works of fiction.
2. On the first of the month, you will post a welcome/introduction/kickoff for the theme.
3. Throughout the month, you'll take an active part in discussion of the theme.

You do not have to be an expert on the theme to run it. You just need to have an interest in it.

Comments

Plagues and pandemics

[damned_colonial]

Theme: plagues and pandemics
Prepared to run it: guess so
Suggested books:

Geraldine Brooks, "Year of Wonder"
Connie Willis, "Doomsday Book"

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[gloss]

If drama counts, One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace is *stunning*.

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[damned_colonial]

I was wondering about plays earlier, esp. Shakespeare so that eg. Henry V would count for the comm. I'm undecided.

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[gloss]

More...
The Midnight Queen, May Agnes Fleming. Gutenberg text, late 19th-century Gothic about London's Great Plague.

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[damned_colonial]

Awesome! Thus fulfilling the Gutenberg requirement.

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[lookingland]

Prayer for the Dying (by O'Nan) ~ fabulously wicked.

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[forodwaith]

Some more suggestions, none of which I've read yet:

A journal of the plague year is on Gutenberg.

The plague tales and The physician's tale (both by Ann Benson) are twinned narratives like Doomsday book, near-future/Black Plague timelines, though they don't AFAIK involve time travel.

Unsurprisingly, both the YA and SF genres are full of pandemic apocafic, so this category could be both broad and deep.

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[naraht]

I'd definitely second "A Journal of the Plague Year." Classic.

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[naraht]

Kim Stanley Robinson, "The Years of Rice and Salt"

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[epershand]

If non-fiction counts: John M. Barry, The Great Influenza

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[vehemently]

Another title: Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793, about Yellow Fever in Revolutionary War USA.

M. T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing book I (subtitle: The Pox Party) is, needless to say, partly about the Pox (also in Revolutionary War USA).

I swear people not named Anderson also write novels about diseases too.