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Old 01-18-2009, 11:48 AM   #1
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February 09 book nominations

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?

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Old 01-18-2009, 11:50 AM   #2
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One suggestion. For each initial nomination for a book, posting a brief summary or abstract would really help.

BOb
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Old 01-18-2009, 11:54 AM   #3
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Are there many contemporary books on MR?
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Old 01-18-2009, 11:54 AM   #4
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stuck.
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Old 01-18-2009, 11:56 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lilac_jive View Post
Are there many contemporary books on MR?
This is and issue I was going to post in the opening message.. but figured someone would bring it up. I don't know the answer to your question lilac. My bigger question would be...

What qualifies as contemporary? Would it be book written since 1900? Would it be books who's authors are still alive?

BOb
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Old 01-18-2009, 11:57 AM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel View Post
stuck.
Thanks Z.
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:02 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob View Post
This is and issue I was going to post in the opening message.. but figured someone would bring it up. I don't know the answer to your question lilac. My bigger question would be...

What qualifies as contemporary? Would it be book written since 1900? Would it be books who's authors are still alive?

BOb
To me contemporary is in the last twenty years or so, but most of the books on MobileRead are much older than that.

Can we include the 9 free books from Random House? They aren't available on MobileRead but they are free for at least the Kindle and Reader (I think for all of them, but I don't know for sure)
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:04 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob View Post
This is and issue I was going to post in the opening message.. but figured someone would bring it up. I don't know the answer to your question lilac. My bigger question would be...

What qualifies as contemporary? Would it be book written since 1900? Would it be books who's authors are still alive?

BOb
wikipedia says that "Contemporary literature is literature with setting generally after World War II."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_literature
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:06 PM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lilac_jive View Post
Can we include the 9 free books from Random House? They aren't available on MobileRead but they are free for at least the Kindle and Reader (I think for all of them, but I don't know for sure)
What does everyone think? I think the point was to make sure everyone could participate without having to buy a certain book every month. So, if we want to go with "freely available" that would be fine with me. Although they would have to still be "free" at the end of the voting period to qualify. I'm not sure how long those 9 freebees will last.

BOb
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:06 PM   #10
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For english contemporary works on Feedbooks try the following URIs:
- http://www.feedbooks.com/userbooks/recent?lang=en
- http://www.feedbooks.com/books/year?lang=en
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:11 PM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel View Post
wikipedia says that "Contemporary literature is literature with setting generally after World War II."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_literature
So, does that pretty much mean any Sci-Fi/Fantasy type book would qualify regardless of when it was written. So something like 20k Leagues under the Sea written in 1869 would qualify? I'm so confused.

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Old 01-18-2009, 12:13 PM   #12
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Let's go for anything written after the end of World War II as contemporary. That (IMHO) would do fine.
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:19 PM   #13
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So, if we want to go with "freely available" that would be fine with me. Although they would have to still be "free" at the end of the voting period to qualify. I'm not sure how long those 9 freebees will last.
The Random House titles are free until "11:59pm, February 28", i.e. until the end of February.
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:30 PM   #14
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I'll nominate Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.

Quote:
Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies…and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World. Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the longago twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer "adhocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest hightech touches. Now, though, it seems the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive directtobrain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of evershifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes. Bursting with cutting-edge speculation and human insight, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom reads like Neal Stephenson meets Nick Hornby: a comingofage romantic comedy and a kickbutt cybernetic tour de force.

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Old 01-18-2009, 12:30 PM   #15
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The Random House titles are free until "11:59pm, February 28", i.e. until the end of February.
So we should be good with them, at least.

That at a minimum will give us more to play with. And of course, we can nominate more if we find them. But this at least gives us something to start with.
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