Book Club: F*ck It, We're Reading "Light in August" Now

Look, about the TI Book Club.  It's never been the most popular feature of the site, and ever since the wonderful Dr. Dastardly took a sabbatical from the site, it's been mostly headed up by me, and I've admittedly done a pretty terrible job of doing that.  So anyway, I kinda just kept putting off having a poll for what book we should read next, and as a result, Book Club is, if not dead, certainly on life support or some similarly hackneyed metaphor for "barely a viable thing anymore".  So anyway, as the idea of a Trump presidency really being a thing that was going to happen started sinking in a couple of hours ago, I was overcome by a desire to read some great work of literature.  Which is pretentious as hell, probably, but whatever.  And I've read Light in August several times, and in a lot of ways it's a fantastic exploration of a lot of the racism and misogyny that have been a pernicious, all-powerful force in American society throughout its history, and which has played a major role in the election of Trump, a man who embodies that bigotry to such a profound extent that before he announced his candidacy most would have thought it a caricature.  But it is not caricature; Trump's bigotry is the unbridled id of this nation, and so, as we are made to contemplate the unpleasant truth that the United States is fundamentally a profoundly racist, misogynistic, and unequal nation, I think Light in August offers one of American literature's better explorations (by a straight white male author, at least) of that horrible reality.

So yeah, if you have any objections to this being the Book Club selection without any sort of prior nomination/poll process, then feel free to let me know, and I may very well change it.  But I do have a lot of thoughts about this book, I do plan on being a much more active person-running-the-book-club this time around, and I'm trying to resuscitate a dying feature of the site (and I guess I could make an obvious joke about how democracy is worthless anyhow given the election results, but I don't actually believe that as a person who believes in actually valuing the concept of democracy, unlike our current President Elect).  So yeah, feel free to join in, and hopefully we'll get enough discussion such that we get this Book Club up and running again.