News on the 'Widow's Son' book discussion

August 23 is a big day for the blog. That's when we begin the weekly online reading group for The Widow's Son, Robert Anton Wilson's own personal favorite novel. The discussion will be led by my special guest blogger, Gregory Arnott, who plans to cover about 20 pages a week. As usual, everyone is welcome and invited to weigh in with comments. The official text is the Hilaritas Press edition (I bought the new Hilaritas ebook to go with my old paperback) but you can use whatever you can afford/get your hands on. 

Here's a few words from Mr. Arnott:

"I'll recommend parts of Flann O'Brien's corpus as well as other suggested readings that intrepid members of the group could check out for additional depth- tidbits of the original text from Hume, Voltaire, de Sade, and other Enlightenment-era philosophers that are directly mentioned in the text. The Widow's Son also deals heavily with the Irish occupation and a lot of Wilson's themes on the Irish mentality so there will be links to his other writings for these subjects. One of the highlights of the book is Sir John's evisceration before the Royal Society which corresponds directly to the CSICOP panel that RAW was so horrified by.  I also plan on delving on the difference between being skeptical and just accepting evil deeds as "being someone else's reality tunnel."

"So in my typical style this will mostly be a literary, magical, and philosophical commentary on the book on my part with my fellow readers filling in their own observations."