[pilotbob]

The nominations will run through Jan 24th.
Voting (new poll thread) will run for 5 days starting Jan 25.

Book selection category for February per the "official" club opening thread is:

February
MobileRead Contemporary (can be any genre, but must be contemporary and must be available in our library)

EDIT: By club member decision ANY freely available books can be nominated. As long as it can be downloaded for free at the end of the voting period and for some time afterwards.

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

This will be limited to no more than 10 books.

The floor is open to nominations.

Please if I miss one that got three... please let me know before I open the polling thread.

BOb - self-appointed vice president of the MRBC.


Official choices each with three nominations:

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Little Brother is my first young adult novel, a story about hacker kids in San Francisco who use technology to reclaim democracy from the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist attack and the concomitant crackdown. It was published by Tor Books on April 29, 2008.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
My first novel was published in January 2003. It concerns the machinations of technologically immportals who have occupied Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion and who aim to preserve it from the depredations of modernizers who would renovate it.
The book won the 2003 Locus Award for Best First Novel and is a finalist for the 2004 Nebula for Best Novel.

Refuge by Richard Herley
Like The Penal Colony, this is a thriller set in the near future.
It is twelve years on from a global plague. John Suter believes himself the sole survivor. He has gradually come to terms with his fate and has settled into a steady and self-reliant daily routine.
One morning he finds a mutilated body in the river near his house. In his terror, Suter knows he has no choice but to investigate.
What he discovers upstream stretches his endurance to its limits and forces him to reassess not only his own humanity, but also his place within the human family he had once believed extinct.
(The author has waved the requirement to pay for this book if you enjoy it. However, I would submit that you still should pay for it. Assuming we choose this book.)

Poker Without Cards: A Consciousness Thriller by Ben Mack
The book is in form of a dialog that occurs between a psychologist and a friend of an admitted patient. In the dialog the psychologist is trying to understand the events that led to the mental breakdown of “Bucky”, who prior to the breakdown was an intellect. Bucky’s friend Howard Campbell, in the dialog, uncovers Bucky’s life and ideas to the psychologist.

Prague by Arthur Phillips
A first novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune—financial, romantic, and spiritual—in an exotic city newly opened to the West. They harbor the vague suspicion that their counterparts in Prague, where the atmospheric decay of post–Cold War Europe is even more cinematically perfect, have it better. Still, they hope to find adventure, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making. What they actually find is a deceptively beautiful place that they often fail to understand. What does it mean to fret about your fledgling career when the man across the table was tortured by two different regimes? How does your short, uneventful life compare to the lives of those who actually resisted, fought, and died? What does your angst mean in a city still pocked with bullet holes from war and crushed rebellion?