MobileRead April 2010 Book Club Nominations

[ctol]

Candide for sure. even thought I nominated it I agree with Ea and others that it would make for some lively debate.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Ea

Upping the ante... My avatar has expressed an interest in your avatar... (think I can go no higher )

Candide is closing in! Any other offers?

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Just give up on this nomination and vote for Lamb. You know you want to.

I thought you would be campaigning for Topper again.

BOb

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And now Fool has been thirded and can be the winning book.

I assume that is a third. Or did you think it had 3 already? I count yours as the third nomination.

BOb

[pilotbob]

Ok... here's my counts now...

(3) The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald.
The Egg and I, first published in 1945, is a humorous memoir by American author Betty MacDonald about her adventures and travails as a young wife on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. The book is based on the author's experiences as a newlywed in trying to acclimate and operate a small chicken farm with her first husband Robert Heskett[1] from 1927 to 1931 near Chimacum, Washington. On visits with her family in Seattle, she told stories of their tribulations, which greatly amused them. In the 1940s, MacDonald's sisters strongly encouraged her to write a book about these experiences. The Egg and I was MacDonald's first attempt at writing a book.

(2) And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer.
Eoin Colfer, a lifelong fan of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series, says he was 'dumbfounded' when he got the call to write this book, but Adams' widow and his daughter had read all of Colfer's books and felt he was the perfect person to write the sixth book in the trilogy.

(2) The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde
"The first in a series of outlandishly clever adventures featuring the resourceful, fearless literary detective Thursday Next-a New York Times bestseller!In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Bront?'s novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasy-enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel-unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix."

(3) Topper by Thorne Smith
It all begins when Cosmo Topper, a law-abiding, mild-mannered bank manager, decides to buy a secondhand car, only to find it haunted by the ghosts of its previous owners—the reckless, feckless, frivolous couple who met their untimely demise when the car careened into an oak tree. The ghosts, George and Marion Kerby, make it their mission to rescue Topper from the drab "summer of suburban Sundays" that is his life—and they commence a series of madcap adventures that leave Topper, and anyone else who crosses their path, in a whirlwind of discomfiture and delight.

(3) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Via www.fantasticfiction.co.uk A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, and suspicious of anything modern - this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, crusader against dunces. In revolt against the 20th century, Ignatius propels his bulk among the flesh-pots of a fallen city, documenting life on his Big Chief tablets as he goes, until his mother decrees that Ignatius must work.

(1) Desparate Husbands by Richard Glover
From Amazon: The new book from the author of In Bed with Jocasta and The Dag's Dictionary. Meet Richard, the original desperate husband, and his partner, the fabulous but formidable Jocasta. And say hello to their teenage offspring - the Teutonic Batboy and his irrepressible younger brother. Desperate Husbands lifts the lid on so-called normal family life, and reveals its soulful, hilarious absurdity. Welcome to a world where household appliances conspire against their owners, fathers practise ballet in the hallway and dead insects spell out an SOS on the kitchen floor. By turns sweet-natured yet perverse, familiar yet wildly original, Desperate Husbands may be the funniest book you read this year. 'Desperate Husbands is desperately, wickedly funny. I devoured it in one sitting, greedily checking ahead to see that I still had pages left. Richard Glover has done the miraculous - he's made ordinary family life extraordinarily entertaining. This is a must-read for anybody who's ever had a wife or a husband or a mother or a stove or a child or a pulse. Go ahead and open a page at random - you'll laugh out loud.' - Augusten Burroughs, bestselling author of Running with Scissors

(1) Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
Discworld's equivalent of Santa Claus, the Hogfather (who flies in a sleigh drawn by four gigantic pigs), has been spirited away by a repulsive assassin, Mr. Teatime, acting on behalf of the Auditors who rule the universe and who would prefer that it exhibited no life. Since faith is essential to life, destroying belief in the Hogfather would be a major blow to humanity. It falls to a marvelously depicted Death and his granddaughter Susan to solve the mystery of the disappeared Hogfather, and meanwhile to fill in for him. On the way to the pair's victory, readers encounter children both naughty and nice; gourmet banquets made of old boots and mud; lesser and greater criminals; an overworked and undertrained tooth fairy named Violet; and Bilious, the god of hangovers, among other imaginative concepts.

(1) Village of the Small Houses: A Memoir of Sorts by Ian Ferguson
Synopsis borrowed from GoodReads: Ian Ferguson won the 2004 Leacock Medal for Humor for this outrageously funny book about growing up destitute in the far north. Beginning with the dramatic events surrounding his birth, the richly recalled events of Ferguson's life and a vivid cast of loveable misfits make for a taut and appealingly idiosyncratic tale. In 1959, just one step ahead of the law, Hank Ferguson (the Ferguson brothers' con-artist dad) headed north in a beat-up two-toned 1953 Mercury Zephyr with his pregnant wife, Louise. He got as far as remote Fort Vermilion. Passing himself off as a teacher at the local "Indian school," he settled his ever-expanding family in what was then Canada's third poorest community. In this spirited reading, originally broadcast on CBC Radio in September 2004, Ian Ferguson's gifts as a comic actor rise exuberantly to the fore.

(3) My man Jeeves

(3) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
Wikipedia says "The novel explains the tale of Hank Morgan, a 19th-century resident of Hartford, Connecticut who awakens to find himself inexplicably transported back in time to early medieval Britain at the time of the legendary King Arthur".

(3) Fool from Christopher Moore
This is from Publisher's Weekly (as cited on Amazon):
Starred Review. Here's the Cliff Notes you wished you'd had for King Lear—the mad royal, his devious daughters, rhyming ghosts and a castle full of hot intrigue—in a cheeky and ribald romp that both channels and chides the Bard and all Fate's bastards. It's 1288, and the king's fool, Pocket, and his dimwit apprentice, Drool, set out to clean up the mess Lear has made of his kingdom, his family and his fortune—only to discover the truth about their own heritage. There's more murder, mayhem, mistaken identities and scene changes than you can remember, but bestselling Moore (You Suck) turns things on their head with an edgy 21st-century perspective that makes the story line as sharp, surly and slick as a game of Grand Theft Auto. Moore confesses he borrows from at least a dozen of the Bard's plays for this buffet of tragedy, comedy and medieval porn action. It's a manic, masterly mix—winning, wild and something today's groundlings will applaud. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

(3) "Augustus Carp, Esq. - Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man" by Henry Bashford
From amazon.com: 'Bashford's comic 1924 volume offers the mock autobiography of Augustus Carp, a self-aggrandizing, stuffy, puritanical oaf, who indulges in numerous vices in the name of Christianity, rationalizing his own weaknesses while condemning others for the same acts. Great fun.'

(1) Brewster's Millions by George Barr McCutcheon

(1) The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson

(1) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

(1) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

nix (2) Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

(3) A Damon Runyon Omnibus.
She quotes Wikipedia: [Runyon] was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from the Brooklyn or Midtown demi-monde. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character as well as to the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicted. He spun humorous tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit," "Big Jule," "Harry the Horse," "Good Time Charley," "Dave the Dude," or "The Seldom Seen Kid." Runyon wrote these stories in a distinctive vernacular style: a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in present tense, and always devoid of contractions.

(3) Six of One by Rita Mae Brown
"Perched right on the Mason-Dixon line, tiny Runnymede, Maryland, is ripe with a history almost as colorful as the women who live there—from Celeste Chalfonte, headstrong and aristocratic, who murders for principle and steals her brother’s wife, to Fannie Jump Creighton, who runs a speakeasy right in her own home when hard times come knocking. Then of course, there’re Louise and Julia, the boldly eccentric Hunsenmeir sisters. Wheezie and Juts spend their whole lives in Runnymede, cheerfully quibbling about everything from men to child-rearing to how to drive a car. But they never let small-town life keep them from chasing their biggest dreams—or from being true to who they really are. Sparkling with a perfect combination of sisterhood and sass, Six of One is a richly textured Southern canvas—Rita Mae Brown “at her winning, fondest best”(Kirkus Reviews). " [from Amazon]

(1) Love in a cold climate by Nancy Mitford
"Groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, fearsome Lady Montdore, Polly instead scandalizes society by declaring her love for her uncle ‘Boy’ Dougdale, the Lecherous Lecturer, and promptly eloping to France. But the consequences of this union no one could quite expect..."

(2) Candide by Voltaire

(1) The Distance Travelled by Brett Alexander Savory
"Why have certain denizens of Hell taken to throwing farm animals through innocent folks' kitchen windows? How long does it take a dead, desiccated gas attendant to walk out to his pumps? What sort of relationship do the Lord of the Underworld and Hell's Head Torturer have, besides the obvious professional one? What kind of air conditioning units do they use down there? Do they listen to Cyndi Lauper? What is Hell's official currency, and by what criteria did the Big Red Fella choose it? Can pigs eat cereal with a spoon? What nameless beast dwells in the flame pit near the hole to Upside? What is Upside, for that matter, and why should you care, anyway?" from Amazon.

(3) Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years -- except Biff.Ever since the day when he came upon six-year-old Joshua of Nazareth resurrecting lizards in the village square, Levi bar Alphaeus, called "Biff,"had the distinction of being the Messiah's best bud. That's why the angel Raziel has resurrected Biff from the dust of Jerusalem and brought him to America to write a new gospel, one that tells the real, untold story. Meanwhile, Raziel will order pizza, watch the WWF on TV, and aspire to become Spider-Man.Verily, the story Biff has to tell is a miraculous one, filled with remarkable journeys, magic, healings, kung-fu, corpse reanimations, demons, and hot babes -- whose considerable charms fall to Biff to sample, since Josh is forbidden the pleasures of the flesh...

So, 6 made the list. I will add them to message one right now.

BTW: Some people nominated stuff that already had 3. Sorry, I didn't keep track. I think My Man Jeeves had more than 3 as did Connecticut Yankee and Maybe The Egg and I.

If you nominated those you might want to go backward from your nomination and see if it was post 3rd... so you can get that nomination and reuse it on something else... if you want.

BOb

[Ben Thornton]

My Man Jeeves is by P G Wodehouse

Synopsis:
Containing drafts of stories later rewritten for other collections (including "Carry On, Jeeves"), "My Man Jeeves" offers a fascinating insight into the genesis of comic literature's most celebrated double-act. All the stories are set in New York, four of them featuring Jeeves and Wooster themselves; the rest concerning Reggie Pepper, an earlier version of Bertie. Plots involve the usual cast of amiable young clots, choleric millionaires, chorus-girls and vulpine aunts, but towering over them all is the inscrutable figure of Jeeves, manipulating the action from behind the scenes. Early or not, these stories are masterly examples of Wodehouse's art, turning the most ordinary incidents into golden farce.

[kennyc]

Eek too many choices!

[pilotbob]

Opps... sorry I counted wrong... thats actually 10.

(And I haven't even used any noms yet.)

We usually stop at 10. So, any last minute noms get em in... I'll put the poll up when I get home in about an hour or so.

BOb

[Sparrow]

We could always drop 'Lamb' - post 116 is a thirding, but doesn't say for what (we're assuming 'Lamb' I think) - it's a hanging chad scenario.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by ficbot

Third it. I have it and have not read it yet.

Can you verify this nomination was for Lamb?

BOb

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Can you verify this nomination was for Lamb?

BOb

Sounds like that was a "third" to me. hey, but what do I know??

[Katti's Cat]

Bob - you have to take of the nomination 'Six of One' - I could not find it as eBook. Unless you found a source where to buy it.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

I thought you would be campaigning for Topper again.

BOb

Nope.. I found Lamb and want that one to win.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Can you verify this nomination was for Lamb?

BOb

If you read the post before you'll see that this definitely is a third for Lamb.

[Katti's Cat]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If you read the post before you'll see that this definitely is a third for Lamb.

I vote for Lamb - if a third nomination is needed. Hilarious book.