MobileRead January 2015 VOTE

[WT Sharpe]

MobileRead Book Club
January 2015 VOTE

Help us select the next book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for January, 2014.

Book selection category for January is:

Second Chance

There will be no nominations this month. The way Second Chance works is that the poll is comprised of selections that either came in second place or tied for second place during the previous 11 months.

The poll will be open for 5 days. There will be no runoff vote unless the voting results a tie, in which case there will be a 3 day run-off poll. This is a visible poll: others can see how you voted. It is You may cast a vote for each book that appeals to you. Here are the selections you will be considering:

• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• Cocaine Blues (Phryne Fisher #1) by Kerry Greenwood
• Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
• Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
• The Iron King by Maurice Druon
• The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde

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February: Romance
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Zola (Exclusive)

Spoiler:

Full Description (from Zola):

The Time Traveler’s Wife, one of the best romance books of all time, is now available as an eBook!

Audrey Niffenegger's dazzling debut is the story of Clare, a beautiful, strong-minded art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: his genetic clock randomly resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous and unpredictable, and lend a spectacular urgency to Clare and Henry's unconventional love story. That their attempt to live normal lives together is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control makes their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

Plus, the long-awaited sequel to Audrey Niffenegger’s time-traveling love story is finally here!

The ebook includes the first 25 pages of Niffeneger’s sequel featuring Henry and Clare’s daughter, Alba. Gifted with Clare’s beauty and Henry’s unique abilities, Alba finds herself caught between her real-time husband, Zach, and her other husband, Oliver, a fellow time-traveler and musician.

Get your ebook today and dive into this classic romance novel. Find the rest of Audrey Niffenegger’s books here and more of the best love story books. Shop eBooks today!

March: Travel/Adventure
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
Amazon Ca / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo

Spoiler:

From National Geographic:

With all the flash and fireworks of Wolfe's writing, it's easy to overlook that, at bottom, he's a great reporter. And this long and intimate look into the lives, minds, and deeds of the men who rode the first American rockets into space remains Wolfe's best book and the first true classic from the dawn of space exploration. The race with the Russians, the dauntless Chuck Yeager—Wolfe piles story upon story, and the pile glows.
Bantam, 1996.

April: Classics
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: Oz Omnibus: BBeB/LRF (Illustrated) / ePub / Kindle / Kindle (Illustrated)

Spoiler:

We all know and love the movie, but as we all know "the book is always better than the movie". Let's find out if that is true and discuss together...

May: Mystery/Thriller
• Cocaine Blues (Phryne Fisher #1) by Kerry Greenwood
Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

The Amazon description:
From Publishers Weekly
The growing American audience for Phryne Fisher, Australian author Greenwood's independent 1920s female sleuth, will be delighted that her diverting first mystery is finally available in the U.S. Fisher's off-the-cuff solving of a high society jewel theft leads her to her first professional engagement when a witness to her brilliance asks her to investigate a possible poisoning-in-progress. The detective's admirable willingness to intervene to help those in distress involves her in a variety of other puzzles, including identifying the King of Snow, who has taken over the Melbourne drug trade. Many of the members of Fisher's entourage familiar from later novels make their debuts as well.

From Booklist
Australian Greenwood has been exporting her outstanding Phryne Fisher series to the U.S. for the past several years, but the books haven't arrived in chronological order. Finally, we have the series debut, which explains how the irrepressible flapper (the series is set in the 1920s) became a detective. Phryne fans will relish the chance to see how beloved characters like Bert, Cec, Dot, and Inspector Robinson wandered into Phryne's life, and newcomers will enjoy getting to know ultrafashionable Phryne, who's wealthy enough to do whatever she wants but whose previous poverty has created a strong empathy for the working class. In Melbourne to investigate the mysterious illness of the daughter of a family friend, Phryne stumbles into a case involving two of the 1920s' signature evils: cocaine and back-alley abortions. Banding together with a crew of colorful local characters, and finding time to indulge in some erotic fun with a sexy Russian dancer, Phryne soon leaves her mark on Melbourne. From beginning to end, Greenwood infuses her series with evocative settings, multidimensional characters, and satisfying mysteries.

June: Award Winners
• Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
Amazon US

Spoiler:

In one of Robert Heinlein's most controversial bestsellers, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe--and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's most frightening enemy.

July: Non-fiction
• Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
Amazon Au / Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Google Play

Spoiler:

Amazon.com Review
Oliver Sacks on Your Inner Fish:
(Since the 1970 publication of Migraine, neurologist Oliver Sacks's unusual and fascinating case histories of "differently brained" people and phenomena—a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a community of people born totally colorblind, musical hallucinations, to name a few--have been marked by extraordinary compassion and humanity, focusing on the patient as much as the condition. His books include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film), and 2007's Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is Professor of Clinical Neurology at Columbia University.)

Your Inner Fish is my favorite sort of book—an intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story, one which will change forever how you understand what it means to be human.

The field of evolutionary biology is just beginning an exciting new age of discovery, and Neil Shubin's research expeditions around the world have redefined the way we now look at the origins of mammals, frogs, crocodiles, tetrapods, and sarcopterygian fish—and thus the way we look at the descent of humankind. One of Shubin's groundbreaking discoveries, only a year and a half ago, was the unearthing of a fish with elbows and a neck, a long-sought evolutionary "missing link" between creatures of the sea and land-dwellers.

My own mother was a surgeon and a comparative anatomist, and she drummed it into me, and into all of her students, that our own anatomy is unintelligible without a knowledge of its evolutionary origins and precursors. The human body becomes infinitely fascinating with such knowledge, which Shubin provides here with grace and clarity. Your Inner Fish shows us how, like the fish with elbows, we carry the whole history of evolution within our own bodies, and how the human genome links us with the rest of life on earth.

Shubin is not only a distinguished scientist, but a wonderfully lucid and elegant writer; he is an irrepressibly enthusiastic teacher whose humor and intelligence and spellbinding narrative make this book an absolute delight. Your Inner Fish is not only a great read; it marks the debut of a science writer of the first rank.

August: Science Fiction
• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo

Spoiler:

The Time Traveller, a dreamer obsessed with traveling through time, builds himself a time machine and, much to his surprise, travels over 800,000 years into the future. He lands in the year 802701: the world has been transformed by a society living in apparent harmony and bliss, but as the Traveler stays in the future he discovers a hidden barbaric and depraved subterranean class. Wells's transparent commentary on the capitalist society was an instant bestseller and launched the time-travel genre.

September: Banned/Challenged Books
• The Giver by Lois Lowry (Tie for 2nd place)
Amazon US / Goodreads

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

Jonas' world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear or pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the Community. When Jonas turns twelve, he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back.

• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Tie for 2nd place)
Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Angus & Robertson / B&N / Google Play / Kobo US / Overdrive

Spoiler:

Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep south—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred, available now for the first time as an e-book.

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father-a crusading local lawyer-risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

October: Patricia Clark Memorial Library
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The Patricia Clark Memorial Library: EPub | Kindle

Spoiler:

No synopsis given.

November: Foreign (originally non-English)
• The Iron King by Maurice Druon
Amazon US / Kobo CA / Kobo US / Overdrive

Spoiler:

Goodreads blurb:

The Iron King – Philip the Fair – is as cold and silent, as handsome and unblinking as a statue. He governs his realm with an iron hand, but he cannot rule his own family: his sons are weak and their wives adulterous; while his red-blooded daughter Isabella is unhappily married to an English king who prefers the company of men.

A web of scandal, murder and intrigue is weaving itself around the Iron King; but his downfall will come from an unexpected quarter. Bent on the persecution of the rich and powerful Knights Templar, Philip sentences Grand Master Jacques de Molay to be burned at the stake, thus drawing down upon himself a curse that will destroy his entire dynasty

Originally published in 1955 in French.

December: Short Stories
• The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub (Complete Works) / LibriVox (Audiobook) / Project Gutenberg (Various Formats)

Spoiler:

From LibriVox:

The American Minister and his family have bought the English stately home Canterville Chase, complete with the ghost of Sir Simon de Canterville - blood-stains, clanking chains and all. But these modern Americans will have no truck with ghostly goings-on, and set out to beat the spectre at his own game. (Summary by David Barnes)

[WT Sharpe]

Wondering if a particular book is available in your country? The following spoiler contains a list of bookstores outside the United States you can search. If you don't see a bookstore on this list for your country, find one that is, send me the link via PM, and I'll add it to the list.

Spoiler:

Australian
Angus Robertson
Booktopia
Borders
Dymocks
Fishpond
Google

Canada
Amazon. Make sure you are logged out. Then go to the Kindle Store. Search for a book. After the search results come up, in the upper right corner of the screen, change the country to Canada and search away.
Google
Sony eBookstore (Upper right corner switch to/from US/CA)

UK
BooksOnBoard (In the upper right corner is a way to switch to the UK store)
Amazon
Foyle's
Google
Penguin
Random House
Waterstones
WH Smith

[GA Russell]

First!

Wish that I could cast multiple votes for Your Inner Fish.

[crich70]

Not sure if I'm 2nd or 3rd. lol.

[obs20]

I'd like to read The Time Traveler's Wife but Zola doesn't give much information on their website on how to use it.

[WT Sharpe]

There were five books on that list for which I didn't vote for no better reason than that I'd already read them: The Time Traveler's Wife, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Cocaine Blues, The War of the Worlds, and The Canterville Ghost.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by obs20

I'd like to read The Time Traveler's Wife but Zola doesn't give much information on their website on how to use it.

Ms. Niffenegger has never been known to be a great fan of e-books. I can't get the site to render correctly.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by obs20

I'd like to read The Time Traveler's Wife but Zola doesn't give much information on their website on how to use it.

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Ms. Niffenegger has never been known to be a great fan of e-books. I can't get the site to render correctly.

Try the link now. I changed it from https://zolabooks.com/book/the-time-travelers-wife/overview to https://www.zolabooks.com/book/9781939126016/.

[obs20]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Try the link now. I changed it from https://zolabooks.com/book/the-time-travelers-wife/overview to https://www.zolabooks.com/book/9781939126016/.

What device can I read their books on? I have a Nook glow which will read epub and a Kindle basic and Fire phone. I also have a 10 inch android tablet which will probably work with it but I generally find it too large for comfortable reading. There is always the paperback.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by obs20

What device can I read their books on? I have a Nook glow which will read epub and a Kindle basic and Fire phone. I also have a 10 inch android tablet which will probably work with it but I generally find it too large for comfortable reading. There is always the paperback.

Evidently you need to download their app for Apple or Android and read it on one of those platforms.

https://www.zolabooks.com/get-the-app/

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Evidently you need to download their app for Apple or Android and read it on one of those platforms.

https://www.zolabooks.com/get-the-app/

Because of this, if The Time Traveler's Wife wins, I will not read it. I will not read any eBook where I need an iPad app to read it.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Because of this, if The Time Traveler's Wife wins, I will not read it. I will not read any eBook where I need an iPad app to read it.

You can also read it on Android devices with the Zola app for Android.

I suspect, but don't know, that the format is something related to PDF format. The reason I suspect this is because Ms. Niffenegger is a visual artist and much of her well-known animosity to e-books seems to stem from the way eInk e-book readers render visuals.

[WT Sharpe]

Look at that spread. I think this one's going down to the wire.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

You can also read it on Android devices with the Zola app for Android.

I suspect, but don't know, that the format is something related to PDF format. The reason I suspect this is because Ms. Niffenegger is a visual artist and much of her well-known animosity to e-books seems to stem from the way eInk e-book readers render visuals.

I voted for it because there happens to be my wife's copy sitting on the shelf here so it would be a free read and I've been tempted to read it before. Had I checked the availability issues I would not have voted for it.